Sakanan Plathong, a lecturer at the Faculty of Science, Prince of Songkla University and the head of Coral Reef and Benthos Research Unit. During the last 30 years, his experiences have been mostly on many aspects of marine environment from ecology to management including Marine Environment Impact Assessment, coral reef, Seagrass and Mangrove Management and marine national park management. He was a project leader for the management planning for marine national parks in Thailand. In addition, He was a project leader for the management planning and the preparation of the nomination statement for the Andaman Sea Nature Reserves to be a World heritage area. For regional marine issues, he was a project consultant for UNEP-COBSEA, PEMSEA, BOBLME and IUCN. His extensive research experiences focus on marine benthos from artificial reef, offshore platform and coastal softbottom habitat. Recently, he proposed 11 new species of Benthos from Thai waters.