Curt Ebbesmeyer earned a bachelor degree in mechanical engineering at California State University (Northridge, 1965) and Master of Science (1968) and Ph.D. degrees (1973) in oceanography from the University of Washington. From 1965 to 1974 he was employed by Mobil Oil Corporation, and from 1974 to 2005 as a consultant for Evans-Hamilton, Inc. During those years he published scores of scientific papers, thirty of which dealt with a wide range of floating objects. He was appointed to blue ribbon panels by two governors of Washington state to assess that status of marine waters in the Pacific Northwest. Since 1996 he has published the quarterly newsletter Beachcombers’ Alert. Ebbesmeyer and his work have become the subject of hundreds of radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine interviews, and his book Flotsametrics and the Floating World, co-authored with Eric Scigliano, was published in 2009 by Smithsonian/HarperCollins.