Terence Erasmus
Terry Erasmus was born in 1975. After an extended travelling stint, Terry began studying at the Cape Technikon and qualified with Cum Laude 4 years later as an Industrial Designer in 2000.
He began his first design consultancy working from Cape Town and designed numerous plastic products for the wine, fishing, and aquaculture markets. He especially enjoyed the challenges of designing fishing gear for the rough South African seas.
During one of the marine projects he was priviledged to meet two reknown scientists, Dr. Amos Barkai and Dr. Mike Bergh. Later these same two scientists became his business partners in a new venture, OLGEAR. Terry enjoys the challenges presented by problem solving and when introduced to ozone technology he realised it's potential to solve many problems experienced by their existing customers.
Terry lives in Somerset West, Cape Town and is married.
Dr Amos Barkai
Amos Barkai was born in 1952. In 1978 Amos started a B.Sc. degree in Biology, first at Haifa University, but moved later to Tel-Aviv University. After finishing his B.Sc. in 1981, Amos and his wife decided to further their studies at the University of Cape Town where they were accepted as postgraduate students in 1982. Amos completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cape Town in March 1987.
In 1988 he received the Oceana group prize for the best scientific publication based on Ph.D. research on a marine topic. His work on the complex dynamics of rock lobsters and other benthic species has been published in international journals including the prestigious journal Science. The work on lobster-whelk interactions published in Science is now widely used in biology textbooks. In the late 1980's, his interest shifted from mainly academic research to practical fisheries management, leading to the establishment of OLRAC. Amos is married, has three children and lives in Constantia, Cape Town.
Dr Michael Bergh
Michael Bergh was born in 1957 in Paarl, Cape Province, South Africa.
With an intense schoolboy interest in physical science and mathematics, he registered for a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town in 1976, and graduated with first class honours in 1979.
During his undergraduate years his interest in mathematical modeling developed, and he chose astronomy and celestial dynamics as elective courses. After university he worked for a year in a high pressure physics research division at the CSIR studying the high temperature properties of refractory materials, and the super-high pressure properties of different metal alloys.
At the beginning of 1982, he chose to combine his mathematical interest and his affinity with the sea by registering for an M.Sc. degree in Marine Biology. This work, part of the Benguela Ecology Program, initially focused on large scale food webs in the Benguela Ecosystem.
Increasingly however, he became interested in the commercial motivation behind this research and hence in the quantitative management of fish resources.
This led him to extend his studies at the end of 1983 into a Ph.D. on the statistical characteristics of numerical techniques to estimate the population size of fish stocks, eventually graduating in 1986, with Industrial Sociology as an additional course.
He then spent a year at the University of California in Berkeley, where he published work on the mathematical properties of population models.
The next two years were spent at the University of Washington in Seattle designing experiments on the use of diamond versus square mesh cod-ends in the Pacific groundfish fishery. On returning to Cape Town at the end of 1989, he took up an appointment in the Department of Zoology at UCT to initiate an M.Sc. level course in Quantitative Resource Ecology. At the same time, OLRAC was formed with Amos Barkai as a partner. Michael Bergh is married, has three children and lives in Hout Bay, Cape Town.
.jpg)