Peter Ridd is a geophysicist with over 100 publications, and 35 years’ experience working on the Great Barrier Reef. He works on the physical oceanography of the reef, and also developed a wide range of world-first optical and electronic instruments for measuring environmental conditions near corals and other ecosystems.

He was head of Physics at James Cook University for over a decade before being fired, in 2018, for questioning the quality assurance systems used by reef science institutions. Some of the poor-quality work relates to the affect, or lack of affect, of climate change, and agriculture, on the reef. Ridd now works, unpaid, with agricultural organisations, to improve quality assurance systems of “science” used by Australian governments to make environmental laws and regulations that seriously affect farmers.  He has authored the book Reef Heresy? which looks at all the threats to the Great Barrier Reef and discusses the wider problem of abysmal quality assurance systems used in many fields of research.