Our Team

Erika Ilves

Chief Strategy Officer

Erika Ilves is an entrepreneur and seasoned strategy lead dedicated to creating the systems and conditions required to secure a safe future for the human species. She was co-founder of Offworld, an industrial robotics company, where she led a team of machine learning engineers to develop teachable mining robots, and was also co-founder of Shackleton Energy, where she developed an international public-private consortium to create technologies to extract water ice from the moon in order to fuel deep space missions from low Earth orbit, drastically reducing the costs of such missions. Erika’s 15 years of strategy consulting experience started with McKinsey & Company, where she served global and emerging markets financial institutions on strategy, performance and operational transformations; and later advised GCC governments and investors on transitioning to a green economy. Previously, Erika was an executive at videoconferencing technology firm TANDBERG (acquired by Cisco), where she was responsible for developing leadership and sales capability for the firm’s global sales force. At The Metals Company, Erika is working to build the world’s first vertically integrated clean energy ecosystem by establishing alliances with like-minded leaders in offshore, electric vehicles and renewable energy technology, as well as developing our transparent provenance strategy to enable The Metals Company to establish Clean Metals as a new purchasing category. She is fluent in English, Estonian, Russian and proficient in Danish and French.

Erika Ilves

Chief Strategy Officer
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Leigh Marsh

Senior Environmental Scientist
Leigh Marsh

Leigh holds a PhD in deep-sea ecology from the University of Southampton, where she is also a visiting research fellow. She is an experienced marine researcher specialising in the acquisition, processing and analysis of ROV and AUV imagery and remote sensing data for vulnerable marine ecosystems in the deep ocean. Leigh has participated in over twenty-one research expeditions to the Caribbean Sea, Atlantic, Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans to explore and investigate a range of shelf marine ecosystems and deep-sea habitats including seamounts, canyons and chemosynthetic environments. Leigh has contributed to over 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has lectured at the University of Southampton, University of Portsmouth and for the Open University. As a consultant, Leigh has participated and contributed to deep-sea projects conducted by National Geographic, the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Ocean Exploration Trust. Prior to her academic career, Leigh worked for executive non-departmental public bodies, with a specific focus on the coastal and inshore marine environment and for a large marine consultancy and survey company, primarily for the marine aggregates and offshore renewable sectors. Leigh’s academic experience, coupled with her industry, policy and professional career, provides a comprehensive foundation from which to work with our associated partners to discuss, develop and contribute to the delivery of world-class research as part of the ESIA program.

Leigh Marsh

Senior Environmental Scientist
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Claire Dalgleish

Offshore Technical Lead

Claire is a benthic ecologist and marine environmental monitoring specialist with over 25 years’ experience in planning, managing and leading multi-discipline offshore surveys. In recent years she has specialised in deep water survey operations in the Arctic, Atlantic and North Pacific, including the Clarion Clipperton Zone. She has worked in the oil & gas, wet renewables, offshore dredging and aggregates, and deep-sea mining sectors her entire career, on a wide range of large offshore infrastructure projects at FEED, construction, installation, testing, maintenance, and decommissioning stages for companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell, Wintershall, Dong Energy, RWE and TMC. She has participated in over 150 offshore campaigns to date in the context of EIA monitoring, strategic environmental assessment, habitat mapping, and environmental characterisation studies. Most of them as Client Representative, Party Chief or Principle/Lead. Claire’s extensive knowledge of monitoring equipment and methodologies gained from working offshore for a wide range of industries, academic partners, and regulators, together with her contract and project management experience enables her to successfully deliver offshore campaigns that are within project and regulatory scope both on a technical and HSE basis, and within the allocated project timelines. She applies the highest QA-QC standards in the field to ensure samples and data contributing to environmental assessments are of the highest standard, and scientifically robust. She joined TMC in 2020 as Offshore Technical Lead and has since lead 5 TMC offshore sampling campaigns, including the NORI Collector Test Monitoring campaigns in 2022.

Claire Dalgleish

Offshore Technical Lead
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