Dr. Ted Cheeseman

TBD

About the Speaker

Dr. Ted Cheeseman is a research fellow at the University of California Santa Cruz and co-founder and director of Happywhale, a research collaboration and citizen science platform that uses AI-powered image recognition to track individual whales globally. He completed his PhD in Marine Science at Southern Cross University, Australia, where his widely collaborative work on North Pacific humpback whale populations leveraged AI technology to identify nearly every living whale in the region—revealing that one-third of Hawaiʻi's humpback population was lost following a three-year marine heatwave.

Born into a family of biologists and expedition leaders, Ted led Antarctic expeditions for 30 years before pivoting to marine science. His research has been published in over 40 peer-reviewed papers, and he has contributed to international research collaborations spanning all the world’s oceans. Through Happywhale, he aims to democratize whale research by bringing together scientists and citizen scientists to document entire ocean populations—achieving in a day what previously required a year of data processing. When not studying whales, Ted is happiest anywhere wild, especially in surf, snow, and high mountains.