Addi AZZA

General Engineer, counselor to the Minister of Energy, Mines, Water and Environment

(Morocco)

Addi AZZA is General Engineer, counselor to the Minister of Energy, Mines, Water and Environment since October 2013 after was been Chief of Cabinet of the Minister in charge of Relations with Parliament and Civil Society.

Geological Engineer, graduated from the National School of Mineral Industry (ENIM, Rabat), the National School of Applied Geology (ENSG, Nancy) and Faculty of Sciences Dhar Mehraz, Fes, Addi AZZA was born in 1951 in Errachidia.

After leading the “Division of Mining Geology” at the Geology Directorate and “Mining Research Division” at Mining Directorate, he was responsible for internal audit at the General Inspectorate of the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Mr Azza was also professor of Metallogy at the ENIM High School and Rabat Faculty of Sciences and he directed over twenty doctoral theses.

His researches have focused on the study of lead-zinc and barite deposits and precious metals exploration.

Addi AZZA is married and grandfather of two grandchildren.

BRIGGS Derek E.G.

Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Yale University (New Haven, USA)

Derek E.G. Briggs is G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University.  His primary research interest is in the preservation and evolutionary significance of exceptionally preserved fossils.   He has been at Yale University since 2003 where he has served successively as director of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.  Briggs is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and studied arthropods from the Burgess Shale at Cambridge University with Harry Whittington for his PhD.  Briggs was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and is an honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy.  He has published more than 300 scientific articles and several books including The fossils of the Burgess Shale (with D.H. Erwin and F.J. Collier: Smithsonian Press, 1994).

Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron is the Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. He became fascinated with fossils as a child, and continued to study them at university in his native France. He did his PhD at the University of Toronto on animals that lived during the Cambrian “explosion” of diversity around 540 to 485 million years ago. Many of these animals are now preserved in the Burgess Shale in the Rocky Mountains. Every summer, Dr. Caron leads a team of palaeontologists to recover new fossils so that he can study their fossilization and ecology – how they lived and died. Dr. Caron has won many awards for his research. Several of his studies, including announcements of the discoveries of new organisms, were published in top journals such as Science and Nature. Dr. Caron is also overseeing the development of the ROM’s permanent Gallery of the Dawn of Life.

His initial research on the stratigraphy and palaeontology of the Ordovician rocks of the Girvan district was largely monographic and was recognised by the Clough Memorial Award from the Edinburgh Geological Society. Currently his main research interests have been modified regionally to include studies on the Lower Palaeozoic rocks in NE and N Greenland, Chile, China (including Tibet), Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Russia and his research in Greenland has been recognized by the award of Crown Prince Frederik's Fund. During the last ten years my focus has moved to target some of the larger scale processes in the history of life. Together with a range of colleagues, new models for biotic change and distributions through the Early Palaeozoic, particularly targeting the Cambrian Explosion, Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event and the end-Ordovician extinction, are being developed and their relationships to climatic and environmental changes are being assessed through a range of multidisciplinary techniques.

EL ALBANI Abderrazak

Professor at University of Poitiers

(FRANCE)

Abderrazak El Albani est professeur à l’université de Poitiers. Né à Marrakech, il a effectué ses études à l'université de Lille 1 où il a soutenu une thèse de doctorat de géologie et géochimie sédimentaire en 1995. Il intègre ensuite le laboratoire Hydrasa, (Université de Poitiers-CNRS). Il est nommé professeur des universités en 2010.
En juillet 2010, ses travaux de recherche ont fait la couverture de la revue scientifique Nature. La découverte au Gabon, de fossiles datés de 2,1 milliards d’années, permet de réviser les connaissances quant à l’évolution de la biosphère sur Terre au cours de l’histoire de notre planète.