Seawater Solutions Team
Yanik Nyberg
Founder, CEO
Yanik brings years of experience in international development, having worked on projects in West Africa and Vietnam. Since starting Seawater Solutions, Yanik has built and operated the UK’s first seawater farm, brought crop to market, established a network of commercial, industrial and academic partners, and been recognised through a host of awards and grants.
Greg Martinez
Chief Operations Officer
Greg is a Biologist and R+D project manager for 3 Michelin Star Restaurant Aponiente in El Puerto de Santamaria, Spain, one of the top 100 restaurants in the world. There he works on new product development with seagrasses, seaweeds, and other marine organisms and on sustainable development projects. He is a college national champion in sailing at Georgetown University where he studied biology and anthropology. He also has a MSc in Gastronomic Sciences from the Basque Culinary Centre in San Sebastian.
Nicholas Shell
Co-founder, Chief Technical Officer
Nicholas has a background in marine biology and has worked on aquaculture and development projects from Sierra Leone to Vietnam. Nicholas has managed shrimp farms in Vietnam and is now constructing trial sites to demonstrate the potential for integrating saline agriculture with aquaculture. His experience and language skills allow him to connect with farmers and promote saline agriculture in the region.
Núria Pérez Viura
Chief Marketing Officer
Núria joined Seawater Solutions after doing a masters on Environmental Entrepreneurship at University of Strathclyde. With special interest on issues related to plastic pollution, she has been a member of Glasgow Over Plastic for the last 3 years. Her background is in product and graphic design and helps the team to better communicate creating conceptual drawings and marketing materials, managing social media and building the new website.
Chris Eccles
Project Coordinator (Africa)
Chris draws on his experience from interning with a project management company in California and his years’ work in the contaminated land and waste industry in Scotland to provide nature-based solutions which are environmentally sustainable and effective. Chris’s background is in civil and environmental engineering with a focus of using plants to remediate contaminated urban brownfield sites. Chris will help establish and manage new and existing sites, and has recently been based in Malawi and Namibia helping to set up the first saline agriculture in these countries.
Joella Korczak
Chief Strategy Officer
Joella is an anthropologist, specialising in the nexus of ecology, food, and migration. After a period as a researcher, publishing on migration rights, she became a project manager at the Future Food Convention, a development forum bringing together food security specialists. Joella delivers our research and project agendas in emerging markets.
Vy Nguyen
Quality Assurance Manager
Vy majored in Plant Molecular Biology at Han University in the Netherlands and use her experience in seed technology research and plant breeding to develop farming strategies for salt tolerant crops in Vietnam. Every year, her hometown in Ben Tre Province suffers from salinity intrusion, therefore, she is passionate about taking some of her work back to the community to solve the salinization problem there.
Raphael Yao Ahiakpe
Technical Projects Manager(Africa)
Raphael is a professional aquaculture specialist, with keen interest in integrated agro-aqua systems that promote efficient and sustainable use of resources. He has over a decade of experience in agritech projects and commercial aquaculture operations management. Raphael holds MSc Aquaculture degree from Ghent University (Belgium), and is currently the Technical Lead on InnovateUK Agri-Tech R9 SANGHA project.
Lam Quoc Nhut
Technical Projects Manager(Vietnam)
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Nhut has grown Salicornia on his own land in Nha Be and instructs farmers on cultivation methods in our other sites. Before joining Seawater Solutions, Nhut was a technician at a fertilizer company and has experience with probiotics and organic fertilizer production. Moreover, Nhut became passionate about agriculture and taught himself about soil preparation, horticulture, and how to develop brands for agriculture products. The aquaculture sector is also his strength and he looks forward to developing many other types of salt tolerant vegetables integrated with salt-tolerant fish.
Sam Mackinnon
Chief Strategy Officer
Sam ensures that strategic goals are delivered and advises on strategy formulation across the organisation's activity chain. He supports by developing data-driven, technological initiatives to address, execute, or predict outcomes at macro and micro levels, simplifying processes in complex operational environments. He has a history advising NGOs, government, and the private sector in management and development, and holds degrees in political science, strategic and security studies.