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A high school teacher during the 1960's and early 1970's, Myron ("Mike") Arms abandoned the formal classroom in 1977 in favor of a different kind of educational setting: a 60-foot traditional wooden schooner called Dawn Treader. As founder and director of a program of "sea learning" experiences and as a Coast Guard licensed Ocean Master, he sailed for the next five years with hundreds of teenage boys and girls. "The curriculum was life," says Arms of his program. "The teacher was the sea. I learned as much as my students. We measured the sea's chemistry, sampled its bottom sediments, studied its microscopic populations with a plankton net and microscope. It was the beginning, really, of my own emerging awareness of the stresses being suffered by virtually all of the world's marine environments."

Director and co-founder Amanda Vincent holds the Canada Research Chair in Marine Conservation at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center. She has a PhD in marine biology from the University of Cambridge and was Darwin Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 1994 to 1996. She is considered the leading authority on seahorse biology and conservation, and in 2000 was named a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. She also serves as lead scientific advisor and chair of the seahorse working group for CITES.

Roger Plant is an English rock singer and songwriter, famous for his membership in the former rock band Led Zeppelin as the lead vocalist and lyricist, as well as for his successful solo career. In 2007, he released an album, Raising Sand, produced by T-Bone Burnett with American bluegrass soprano Alison Krauss, which won the 2009 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

Mary Renner is currently serving a three-year term as Chair of the Board of Overseers of the New England Aquarium. She also serves as an ex-officio trustee, member of the Executive Committee and is past President of the Aquarium Council. She has been actively involved at the Aquarium since 1991. She is particularly passionate about this Boston institution because of the Aquarium's commitment, worldwide, to protecting the world of water. In addition to her involvement at the New England Aquarium, Mary is a trustee and Vice President of the Board of Crossroads for Kids, a non-profit organization for homeless and at-risk youth in the greater Boston area. She is also actively involved at Trinity Church in Boston and Dartmouth College. Her professional experience includes eight years in advertising account management at Leo Burnett in Chicago and Young & Rubicam in San Francisco. She also had her own children's clothing manufacturing company.

Mariel Gonzales serves as chief financial officer and vice president for Finance and Administration, overseeing the services that support the delivery of YouthBuild programs and the fulfillment of YouthBuild's mission. Prior to joining YouthBuild, she was vice president and chief operating officer for Boston After School & Beyond, an intermediary working to build the availability and quality of out-of-school time programs, and executive director of Bird Street Community Center, a youth program in Dorchester's Uphams Corner. She has a degree in Asian Studies from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the University of California Haas School of Business.