People

Bill Collins, MSC, P.Geo. Vice President	Chris Elliott, BComm(Hons) Director, Marine
Dave Gregson, M.A.Sc., P.Eng. Chief Engineer	Ben Biffard Ph.D. Applications Scientist
Jon Preston, Ph. D. Senior Scientist	Tony Christney, B. Sc. Marine Technologies Developer
Tony Tipple Senior Technical Sales, Marine	Thomas Younger, B. Sc. Marine Technologies Developer

Bill Collins, MSc, P.Geo.
Vice President
Bill is Vice President of Quester Tangent Corporation.  Bill has a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Earth Sciences from Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has been a Marine Geologist/Sedimentologist for more than twenty years working for Memorial University, the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission and the Ocean Drilling Program before coming to Western Canada to work for the Geological Survey of Canada and eventually Quester Tangent. He has published widely and most recently been investigating the use of seabed classification for habitat mapping.

Chris Elliott, BComm(Hons)
Director, Marine
Chris completed a B. Com. (Hons) degree in Business Administration and Marketing at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He was an officer in the South African Air Force, and conducted marketing research for South African Airways. Following that, he became COO and owner of three inter-related businesses in Port Elizabeth, RSA. This involved importation and wholesale distribution of electrical and electronic components, and manufacture of satellite dishes and TV reception antennae.  He was chairman of Round Table Port Elizabeth and active in Round Table at regional and national level. In 1998, Chris immigrated to Canada and originally joined Quester Tangent as Sales Manager in January 1999.

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David J. Gregson, M.A.Sc., P.Eng.
Chief Engineer
David is responsible for all of Quester Tangent's system design for both marine sciences and rail transit product and service lines. A graduate of the University of Victoria with a Masters of Applied Science Degree, his experience includes the lead role in the design and production of Quester Tangent's QTC VIEW, Monitoring and Diagnostic System, Logic Control Unit, Vehicle Monitoring System and Health Monitoring Unit. Prior to his position at Quester Tangent, David had more than 15 years hardware and software design experience with a focus on data acquisition and data telemetry systems in both marine and industrial environments.

Tony Christney, B. Sc.
Marine Technologies Developer
Raised on the wet west coast of Vancouver Island, Tony has spent most of his life near the sea. His early years in Bamfield, BC (home to a significant fishery as well as a world class marine research facility) exposed him to both the commercial and scientific importance of the world's oceans. Hired as a co-op student in 1997, Tony worked for Quester Tangent for 8 years in the Marine Research department under Jon Preston. From 2005 to 2009 Tony left Quester Tangent to care for his young children. He has returned as a developer working on Quester Tangent's acquisition software.

Ben Biffard Ph.D.
Applications Scientist
Ben started his undergraduate degree in general sciences. He quickly found that the study of Physics suited him best. In the course of completing his honours degree, Ben enjoyed co-op work terms that included work in air and ocean acoustics, climate modelling and astronomy. During a graduate project to deploy a QTC VIEW acquisition system onboard the remotely operated vehicle ROPOS, Ben had several ideas on how to improve single beam classification technology. These ideas were the basis of his subsequent Ph.D. research and include improved discrimination using physics-based features, improved removal of non-seabed influences of water depth and seabed slope and several innovative approaches to seabed characterization. Ben’s thesis is available online. With his Ph.D. complete, Ben has joined QTC as a software developer and scientist.

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Jon Preston, PhD
Senior Scientist
Jon Preston has twelve years experience as a research scientist with the Department of National Defence, Canada. At Defence Research Establishment Pacific (DREP), Victoria, BC, he developed mine countermeasures technology, particularly processing of high-frequency imagery, and towfish altitude and position measurement and control. Much of the work done by the DREP mine countermeasures group can be seen in the route survey payload of the 12 Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels operated by the Canadian Navy. Starting about 1996, his research interests broadened to include both acoustic and invasive sensing of sediments, and he lead several multi-faceted research cruises focusing on sediments. During his years at DREP he published over 20 internal reports and 10 papers in conference proceedings. He was technical chairman of the IEEE Oceans '93 conference. He joined Quester Tangent Corporation in late 1998 and leads the research and development into acoustic seabed classification. QTC 5, a system for classification in very shallow water using echosounders, has been well accepted and is widely used. He spearheaded the development of the swath classification software QTC MULTIVIEW and QTC SIDEVIEW for multibeam and sidescan processing. Both these products are widely used and accepted throughout the industry. Dr. Preston's B. Sc. is from McMaster University, 1970. His Ph. D. work, in the plasma physics group at the University of British Columbia (UBC), dealt mostly with sensors, diagnostic equipment, and signal processing. Between graduation from UBC in 1974 and moving to DREP in 1987, he was responsible for Canada's research and development program in automatic detection of chemical warfare compounds. This work lead to a family of new detectors used in many NATO armies, 25 internal reports, 4 journal papers, and 2 patents.

Tony Tipple
Senior Technical Sales, Marine
Formerly a small business manager and owner in London, UK, Tony Tipple has broad commercial experience in the mining, oil & gas, and forestry markets in Western Canada. His key expertise is developing and supporting specialist dealer networks. Tony's roles are customer support and to develop Quester Tangent's worldwide network of dealers, to maintain excellent commercial and technical communications with them, and to assist them in finding new markets.

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Tom Younger, B.Sc.
Marine Technologies Developer
Tom was born in Victoria, and this is where he has spent the majority of his life. After receiving his B.Sc. in Computer Science with a software engineering emphasis from UVic in 2001, Tom and his fiancee traveled to Europe, where he was contacted by Quester Tangent with an invitation to work for them. He joined Quester Tangent permanently in September of 2002, and works on the development of software for acoustic bottom classification. Tom brings with him experience gained from a number of positions dealing with problems such as sediment transport pathways and paging infrastructures, and a stint working with an environmental engineering firm before joining Quester Tangent.

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