Dr Brown grew up in the mangrove swamps of east Florida, and attended Duke University with high hopes of medical school and making lots of money. Forced by an accident to attend summer school, he opened the school catalog to the middle pages (where the staples are), and discovered the Duke Marine Lab (DUML). Fleeing dreary Durham, he spent a wonderful summer at DUML on the North Carolina coast, and never gave another thought to medicine or money. After kicking around for a couple years with odd jobs he went to the University of Copenhagen to work on a Licentiate (Ph.D.) in Marine Chemistry, obtained in 1975. Returning to the USA, he worked for 25 years with the US government, mainly as a marine program manager for the Interior Department in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). There he wrote the first “nearly GIS” system, called OPCPlot, for sharing digital files of operational marine data. In 1992 he began assisting UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) with training sessions, working in the OceanPC project, a predecessor to today’s OceanTeacher Academy (OTA). He retired in 1999 to work full time on OTA data management exercises, online courseware and face-to-face courses. He wrote/co-wrote most of the data management courses in the OTA catalog at http://classroom.oceanteacher.org and is the editor/author of http://www.marinedataliteracy.org a major collection of practical exercises. Dr. Brown taught Data Management for the NF-POGO Centre of Excellence between 2010 and 2013.He lives, works, fishes and grows tomatoes in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, USA.