Meet Our Team

Dr FR Martin-Lauzer received his engineering diplomas from the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale Supérieure des Techniques Avancées. He holds Masters in Applied Mathematics, in Internal Geophysics and Geochemistry, in Oceanography and in Naval Architecture, as well as a PhD in Materials Science. He is a chartered Project Manager

After a career in the Navy, the public sector and big private companies, he joined the ACRI group to take charge of its development. His roles included director of the French Naval Oceanographic Centre, deputy director of the national Hydrographic Office (SHOM), and general manager of the NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC), in charge of delivering EO-derived forecasts to NATO forces in operations (propogation loss, SST, military environment, etc.).

A former naval aviator, Jean Laporte is Engineer General (Flag Officer, ret.) of the Armament Corps, presently Senior International Advisor at the French Navy Hydrographic and Oceanographic Office (SHOM), Managing Director of ARGANS Ltd and Chairman of the Hydrographic Dictionary WG.

His 30-year hydrographic career has made him sail most of the world’s oceans and seas, from the Arctic and the Mediterranean to remote South Pacific archipelagos where he conducted a large number of hydrographic surveys.

His scope of expertise encompasses hydrography, charting, air and shipborne surveys, satellite bathymetry and remote sensing, International laws of the sea (UNCLOS & SOLAS), EEZ border agreements, Marine Highways, Capacity Building and finally, Chinese history and culture.

Craig brings twenty years of diverse, international leadership experience with a strong commercial focus to ARGANS. He has built businesses and brands holding executive roles as Managing Director responsible for a Region of twelve countries and has multi-sector experience from start-ups to large corporates. These include: Consumer Goods (Coca-Cola); Pulp and Paper (Mondi); Consumer Electronics (Sony Mobile); Clean Tech/Innovation (The Good Fuel Group) and as a Non-Exec Advisory Board Director, Packaging (Specta AG).

He is also a Governor of King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Craig read Modern History and Politics with Philosophy B.A.(Hons) at the University of Southampton followed by post graduate Law, Dip. Law/P.G. Dip Law, at the College of Law in London.

Building on over 30 years’ experience across the military geospatial intelligence domains, Martin is a program manager at ARGANS. During the first part of his Royal Naval career he commanded HM Ships GLEANER, QUORN and as an IHO Cat A charge Hydrographer, ECHO. This latter vessel being the RN’s latest hydrographic and oceanographic global Survey ship, driving her through build, trials and training to full operational status deployed East of Suez. During the latter stages of his military career he negotiated the shared objectives that enable intelligence analysis sharing across the Allied System for GEOINT (ASG), the Five Eyes collaboration, leveraging UK advantage at executive level. Also at the international level Martin directed the multinational community of military geospatial standards design as the Director of the Defence Geospatial Information Working Group (DGIWG) ensuring coherence with the civil geospatial standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Other key experiences include being the British Board Member for the EU Satellite Centre, and Owner’s Adviser for the UKHO and the Intergovernmental Group Advising on the UK Met Office.

Jan Jackson joined the company in December 2007. He is a graduate of Plymouth University with a Masters in Marine Sciences. He is currently the operations manager for the Sentinel 2 Mission Performance Centre and project manager on the Sentinel User Handbook and Exploitation Tools contract with ESA.

His scope of expertise includes project management, technical documentation and customer-facing service support roles such as leading ARGANS quality control activities under the IDEAS Sensor Performance & Product Assessment (SPPA) contract for which he was technical lead for the Landsat, MERIS, MODIS and SeaWiFS instruments.

Dr Emsley holds a Masters in Intelligent Systems for Engineering Design from the University of Plymouth and a Doctorate in Biological Sciences from the University of Warwick. He has held positions at the SAMS Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory, NERC British Oceanographic Data Centre and the University of Plymouth Institute of Marine Sciences.

Joining ARGANS in 2008, his area of expertise encompasses scientific modelling, software engineering and development, system administration and web development. At ARGANS his role has been as project manager, senior engineer and technical lead and has been involved in many projects over the course of his service to the company.

Dr Bahjat Alhammoud received a doctorate from Aix-Marseille and Sorbonne universities (UPMC) in Environmental Sciences (Physical oceanography). After his PhD, he was involved in many National and European projects when he undertook several postdoctoral research at prestigious institutes: University of Utrecht, Ecole Polytechnique, ENSTA-ParisTech and CNRS. His work encompasses ocean-atmosphere interaction, large dataset analysis, high-performance computing, numerical modelling and remote sensing.

Bahjat joined ARGANS in 2014 and has been working on several projects. He is currently the Project Manager of MERIS 4th Reprocessing Validation Team (MVT) and ESL for the ESA’s Sentinel Mission Performance Centre. With key skills in remote sensing, scientific programming and data quality control he is involved in the development of new calibration and validation methodologies for the DIMITRI toolbox.

Rafael is fascinated by ocean-atmosphere processes, especially those leading to severe weather conditions such as the formation of Tropical Cyclones (TC). In 2011, he acquired a master’s degree at NOC (National Oceanography Centre), authoring a thesis concerning the potential of satellite missions, such as SMOS and Aquarius, in observing haline signatures at the ocean surface. In 2019 Rafael completed his PhD research at NOC using satellite and in situ measurements of ocean temperature and salinity, to investigate ocean-atmosphere feedback focusing on the importance of pre-storm ocean stratification during the hurricane season in different ocean basins.

Rafael joined ARGANS in February 2018 as Project Manager of the ESA (European Space Agency) Climate Change Initiative project focusing on the use of Sea Surface Salinity derived from remote sensing as an Essential Climate Variables.

After a Master in geography and land use planning with an option in GIS, modelling and remote sensing, she obtained a PhD in GIS and remote sensing in urban and rural land use. She carried out various studies within the framework of flood risks prevention plans implementation, or for the search of underground marl quarry. She taught during several years the cartography, the statistics and the GIS, in engineer schools and in Universities. During a long time mission in an ERDF cartographic office she updated the electrical network cartography on a GIS platform. In ARGANS Group since 2010, she was executive assistant, assistant manager, in charge of communication functions. She also took part in various studies, in particular, for a future stratospheric platform, to the definition of possible environmental applications and of the associated sensor to put aboard, or for the ADB for detection and cartography of mangrove swamps from VHR satellite images.

Dr Pierre Sicard, PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry, is working on air pollution and climate change impacts on forests ecosystems to reduce the risk for plant ecosystems, by using integrated assessment modelling; deposition model; epidemiological studies; and statistical and multivariate analysis. He is involved in numerous national & EU-funded projects as coordinator (e.g., FO3REST, AIRFRESH) or Principal Investigator and steering committee (e.g., MOTTLES). He has also experience in assessment of air pollution impacts on human health (AirQ model) and developed an Aggregate Risk Index. He is very active in communication: Deputy Coordinator of the RG 8.04.00 “Air Pollution & Climate Change” under the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO); involved as UNECE Expert Panel on Clean Air in Cities and active in the EU Clean Air Forum; member of the Editorial Board of journals (e.g. Environmental Research, Forests and the Atmosphere & Climate journal); member of the scientific committee of meetings, >80 papers, h-index of 30. He is also involved as Regional Expert Group on Climate in “Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur” region.

Dr Philippe Bryere, PhD in Neurosciences and engineer in remote sensing and computer sciences, has been working in the field of marine sciences and satellite observations since 1991, e.g. wind waves and sea ice detection with ERS and NOAA satellites in collaboration with the spatial oceanographic laboratory of French marine institute (IFREMER); French operational coastal oceanography project (PREVIMER) and water quality survey (DCE European directive for coastal marine zones, DCSMM directive for French marine zones). Satellite observed parameters were Sea Surface Temperature, Chlorophyll-a, non-algal suspended matters and turbidity. He works mainly on Ocean Colour (OC) thematic closely with IFREMER and French naval hydrographical service (SHOM) to calibrate/validate OC algorithms and generate end users products. He was involved in several national and ESA/EU projects (e.g. MyOcean, MCGS, SAFI, SMART, IMAPQT, HiSea…) for the generation of end users products, e.g. aquaculture, water quality and marine environmental assessment. Moreover he worked for ANR (French research agency) projects such as GIGASSAT to analyse environmental satellite data in relation with oyster mortality.

Gilbert Langlois is a Senior Engineer in Physical Oceanography, with expertise in Numerical modelling of oceanic & coastal processes, merging of in situ and Earth Observation data and field measurements and joined ARGANS in March 2019. Gilbert completed his Doctorate thesis with the Laboratoire d'Océanographie Physique, Brest, France entitled Hydrodynamics of the French coastal zone 'Mor Braz' (coastal waters off of the western point of Brittany): in situ measurements and numerical modelling of tidal currents.

James joined the ARGANS team in October 2016 following the completion of his MSci Physics and Astrophysics degree from the University of Birmingham. He is currently working on the identification of salt marshes using remote sensing techniques, as well as a part-time PhD researching the sensitivity of marine plastics to remote sensing methods.

Previously he worked on the Mediterranean Marine Litter identification project, as well as the SSGP-supported marine litter identification feasibility project. Prior to this he was involved with QA work on Sentinel-2 products, and validation of Sentinel-3 processed data with the MVT project. His skillset includes image analysis using SNAP and QGIS, Python coding, and data processing.

Simon is a software developer in the ARGANS SMOS team where he is responsible for maintenance of the SMOS L2 Soil Moisture processor (C++). He also contributes to other SMOS activities including both Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity development, as well as assisting analysts in python and other software industry practices throughout the company.

Simon joined ARGANS in October 2017 primarily to continue work on the ESA software 'DIMITRI', a tool for the management and inter-comparison of L1 satellite data.

Originally graduating from the University of Nottingham with a BSc in Physics with Theoretical Physics, Simon subsequently worked as a software developer for over 2 years designing and building a business intelligence dashboard product, gaining experience with a wide range of technologies and all areas of software development.

With an engineering degree in computing and image and signal processing, obtained in 2018 at the school Seatech of Toulon, Fatimatou joined ARGANS as a research engineer. She completed her internship at ARGANS on the remote detection of urban trees. Her fields of expertise are remote sensing: acquisition, correction of image and supervised or not supervised classifications and operation with the SIG. Fatimatou worked on the monitoring of the coastline of Fukushima after the tsunami and on boat detection by high frequency surface wave radar.

She has some experience working with the following programming languages: Python, Matlab, C++ and is developing her expertise in JavaScript and HTML.

Anne-Laure joined ARGANS UK team in February 2019 after graduating from the ENSG (Ecole national des sciences geographiques) in Paris. Her Master's thesis was centred on LASER, Radar and optical remote-sensing processing and analysis. After working on crop monitoring in Thailand and in archaeological sites detection in Slovenia, Anne-Laure is an Earth Observation scientist on the coastal erosion project.

Benjamin joined the ARGANS UK team in April 2018 as an Earth Observation Scientist, in order to contribute towards the Sentinel 3 calibration and validation process for the Mission Performance Centre (MPC). His background is primarily in Remote Sensing for Physical Geography applications, having recently completed the Remote Sensing MSc program at University College London in 2017. Research interests include automatic change detection and image processing techniques; of which his MSc thesis titled: 'Change detection of Martian Volcanism for three independent regions on Mars', thoroughly encompassed these interests.

Harry started his career as an intern with ARGANS in 2018. After completing his Master’s degree in Earth Observation at Swansea University, Harry returned in the role of an Earth Observation Scientist. Since then, he has been involved in a number of projects including: Satellite Derived Bathymetry, Coastal Erosion, Marine Litter and forestry biomass monitoring. While at university, his thesis investigated the ability to model coastal vulnerability to storm events in Belize using open-source satellite data and machine learning.

Noelia joined ARGANS in 2020 after completing a PhD in Geosciences at CNRS-French Guiana. The PhD was aimed at following the mud banks existing in the coastal area of French Guiana under the influence of the Amazon River using remote sensing data and a hydro sedimentary model. Noelia's background is within coastal science and she has used remote sensing data for different applications, such as litter detection, as she is currently part of the Black Sea Litter detection Project using Sentinel-2 data.

Cameron joined ARGANS in 2020 as part of a year in industry internship and has since accepted a permanent position working on our DIMITRI project. Cameron completed his BSc in Applied Geology with honours at the University of Plymouth. Throughout his university education he has had experience and training with GIS, remote sensing and programming to serve geological and geographical purposes and are skills he has advanced since joining ARGANS

Graduated as engineer from SeaTech Toulon and in 2019, joined ARGANS as an R&D engineer in Brest. Sonia has mainly working on images processing to compare in-situ data and high or medium resolution satellite data and develop algorithm to green algal detection on intertidal zone. She was also involved in the mock-up development of for fish farming or port management. Currently, she is working as a Sentinel-3 Operator at the mission performance centre in Sophia Antipolis.

Ben joined ARGANS in October 2021 as a Junior Earth Observation Scientist after completing an MSc in Satellite Data Science at the University of Leicester. His MSc thesis focused on using machine learning to detect burned areas from optical satellite imagery in various regions globally. At ARGANS, Ben is working on the Coastal Erosion project and is keen to build on his programming skills and knowledge of AI applications for remote sensing that he developed at university.

Claire joined ARGANS in November 2017 as Finance Manager and is responsible for all in-house accounts for both the UK and French branches, as well as offering administrative support to the business as a whole. Claire has over 25 years of experience providing book-keeping and accounts analysis to owner managed businesses and brings a wealth of experience to the administrative team.

Dr Keir Finlow-Bates received a Masters in Mathematics and Information Engineering from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation on "The Algebraic Total Alternation of Tensors for Image Recognition Systems", and a Doctorate in Mathematics and Education from London South Bank University with a thesis titled "Investigating Notions of Proof".

He has worked in the software development and testing industries since 1996 and is a named inventor on 32 patents covering fields as diverse as databases, software test engineering, WiFi, location and GNSS, autonomous cars, and IoT, through to cryptography and data handling techniques. Seven patents relate to blockchain technologies, a field he started investigating in 2009, and has been researching in depth since 2015.

A former IHO/Cat A Hydrographer, Henri has spent 30 years of his life as Engineer and Charge Hydrographer in the French Hydrographic Office where he was involved in surveys covering most of the world’s oceans and seas. Still an Advisor on hydrography and oceanography upon his Navy retirement in various French institutes (SHOM, ENSTA Bretagne where he is professor of hydrography) and the International Hydrographic Organization, he has developed a unique knowledge of African rivers and coastal areas.

His scope of expertise encompasses hydrography, data Quality Control, charting, satellite bathymetry & remote sensing, spatial oceanography, International laws of the sea (UNCLOS & SOLAS), EEZ border agreements, Capacity Building, Human Resources (he has been SHOM HR director), risk management, auditing and finally Management (he is also Professor in an Institute of Technology).

Hydrographer and assistant professor of a department of oceanography, Doctor Daniel Huang specialises in UAV imagery, physical oceanography and remote sensing at the University of Applied Sciences of Kaohsiung.

Pol Le Bihan is an engineer specialised in GIS (ESRI/arcGIS, Cadcorp, QGis, CARIS), databases (Oracle Spatial) and cartographic software used in the production of marine data and nautical charts compliant with the International Hydrographic Organisation’s standards (S-57 & S-100) and NATO Additional Military Layers. He is further conversant in the production and use of ENCs and ECDIS.

A recognised expert in the IHO Working Groups, his cartographic career is based on his 28-year experience, 14 of which in the French Navy Hydrographic and Oceanographic Office (SHOM), another 10 at DCNS (Navy shipbuilding) where he developed cartographic cores for combat vessels and finally 4 years as Head of the GEOMOD Geomatic Agency in Brest.

A field cartographer, Pol Le Bihan has also performed a number of missions in Africa combining training and the production of satellite charts in support of Maritime Delimitations.