Dr. Benjamin L. Richards is a Research Fishery Biologist at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, where he leads the bottomfish fish survey team. His work focuses on development of fishery-independent surveys to continually improve the data used in fisheries stock assessment, and on the development of advanced technologies and operational machine learning solutions to optimize data processing and analysis. Dr. Richards currently serves on NOAA’s Artificial Intelligence Executive Committee and provides advice and service to the NOAA Center for Artificial Intelligence. He served as the chair of the NOAA Fisheries Automated Image Analysis Strategic Initiative, which received the 2019 US Department of Commerce Gold Medal for Scientific and Technical Achievement. In 2020, he was awarded the US Department of Commerce Silver Medal for enhancing stock assessment methodologies using camera-based surveys. In 2021, he received the NOAA Fisheries Silver Sherman award for safe and successful implementation of the bottomfish survey under COVID.