Dr. Jyotika Virmani is the executive director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing oceanographic science, research and exploration. Prior to this, she was the executive director of Planet & Environment at XPRIZE and the Rainforest XPRIZE, a competition for innovations in biodiversity assessment technologies. She was also executive director of the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE to spur innovations of unmanned and autonomous deep-sea technologies to map the seafloor rapidly, accurately and at a high resolution. Dr. Virmani joined XPRIZE in 2014 as the technical director for the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, a competition for pH sensor development to measure ocean acidification.

Before joining XPRIZE, Dr. Virmani was the associate director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography and a senior scientist at the UK Met Office. She has a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from the University of South Florida. As a Rotary Foundation ambassadorial scholar, she earned a M.S. in Atmospheric Science from SUNY at Stony Brook. She also has a B.Sc. in Physics from Imperial College London and is an associate of the Royal College of Science. She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and The Explorers Club and a member of the American Meteorological Society and American Geophysical Union. She is co-chair of the U.N. Ocean Decade Technology and Innovation Working Group and serves on Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s board and the U.S. IOOS Federal Advisory Committee.