Our Team

Dr Franziska Elmer

Lead Scientist

  • From mesocosm experiments and flow rate analysis to building and testing barrier designs, Fran manages the day to day running of our trials and grant applications.

Randall Purcell

Director and Co-Founder

  • With more than 25 years of experience on climate and the environment at the World Bank and UN, Randall is helping build ocean partnerships and driving commercial, social and political support for sustainable solutions.

Jan Petzel

Non-Executive Director (NED)

  • After obtaining his master in engineering at the ETH in Zurich, he went on to work for McKinsey & Co, added an MBA, and then built his private equity experience in Goldman’s Merchant Banking business. Over the past 8 years, he has been leveraging his corporate experience in supporting green technology businesses to institutionalise and successfully scale. Most relevantly, he was an early investor in CarbonClean, became their Board Chairman, and supported their scale-up to their recent $150m fundraise to enable the global roll-out their carbon separation technology.

Dr Tremaine Bowman

Scientific Project Manager

  • Tremaine is our Programme Support Officer and uses her extensive knowledge of marine ecology to support our on-site work and data analysis.

John Auckland

CEO and Co-Founder

  • John is the public face of Seafields, as well as bringing a wealth of impact investment experience to our mission.

Richard Wills

Ops Director and Co-Founder

  • Using generations of farming expertise Rich is designing and building our mid-ocean aquafarms in concert with our engineers and scientists.

Rebecca Golding

Chief of Staff

  • Extensive career in the operational management of global teams. Customer Service Management, Gerflor Ltd and an experienced Project Manager for Honeywell Building Solutions.

Nicola Schwehm

Environmental Engineer

  • Nico manages barrier construction in the open ocean along with best practice techniques for ongoing monitoring, data collection.

Tom Newton

Project Engineer

  • Tom is a researcher in environmental fluid dynamics and brings his understanding of buoyancy driven flows to the design of Seafields’ ocean upwelling system.

Will Wilson

Communications and Grants

  • Will manages our social media and communications, he is an ESG and climate change consultant experienced in working with start-ups and has also authored a peer-reviewed paper on microalgae.

Senem Gumussoy

Financial Controller

  • Expert financial consultant and start-up mentor with experience at Carbon Clean and Techstars.

    Provides Seafields financial modelling and forecasting.