Adventurer, expeditioner, and oceanographer, Dr. Robert D. Ballard is best known for his 1985 discovery of the Titanic, the German battleship Bismarck, the lost fleet of Guadalcanal, the U.S. aircraft carrier Yorktown (sunk in the World War II Battle of Midway), and John F. Kennedy’s boat PT-109.

One of his most important discoveries was of hydrothermal vents and “black smokers” in the Galapagos Rift and East Pacific Rise along with their exotic life forms living off the energy of the Earth through a process now called chemosynthesis. Having conducted more than 150 deep-sea expeditions using the latest in exploration technology, Dr. Ballard’s discoveries also include sunken remains of ships along ancient trade routes in the Mediterranean Sea; two ancient Phoenician ships off Israel, the oldest shipwrecks ever found in deep water; and four 1,500-year-old wooden ships, one almost perfectly preserved in the Black Sea. Dr. Ballard’s Black Sea project seeks evidence of a great flood that may have struck the region thousands of years ago.

In 2022, the U.S. Navy named a Pathfinder-class ship, the USNS Robert Ballard, after him. In addition to being a National Geographic Society Explorer-At-Large and a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, Dr. Ballard is the president of the Ocean Exploration Trust and a Research Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He is the founder of the JASON Project, a remote learning K-12 STEM/science curriculum program that reached over 12 million school children. Ballard has produced and been featured in scores of television specials, has published 26 fiction and non-fiction books, and is the recipient of over 30 national and international awards and honors.