Dr Dean Miller is a scientist, conservationist, and multimedia professional with a Ph.D. in coral reef management, tourism and resource allocation and a wealth of scientific experience in the field from Antarctica to the Arctic and everywhere in between. He has been involved in over 300 ocean expeditions on ships all over the globe, but the Great Barrier Reef has been his main focus for the past 25 years.
Dean is the Managing Director and co-founder of the Great Barrier Reef Legacy, a non-profit organisation in Far North Queensland. Their flagship program, the Forever Reef Project, that Dean also created and is the project leader of, is collecting all species of Great Barrier Reef hard corals and keeping them alive in state of the art holding facilities for their ultimate conservation, and to make live corals, tissue samples and genetic material available for reef research and restoration efforts. This ‘coral ark’ is currently holding 179 species of coral, and aims to collect all 415 by 2026. This is Australia’s only living coral biobank, and the planet’s most biodiverse collection, making this one of the largest conservation efforts for coral reefs worldwide.