Sunil is a consultant, educator and speaker in ocean and environmental governance. His passion for Pacem in Maribus (peace in the oceans) stems from his association with Elisabeth Mann Borgese from 1982 to 2002. He has since made it his mission to work on ocean and environmental governance issues through his MasterClass, consultancy, education and training.

Sunil graduated in Mining Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in 1977 where he subsequently conducted research in blasting physics for Indian Explosive Limited of ICI (India) Limited. He then taught Mining Engineering at his alma mater till 1984. This was followed by a stint as Ocean Engineer with MECON (India) Limited where he worked on ocean mining, marine geo-techniques and offshore energy. In 1983-84, he received training in Ocean Resource Management at the International Ocean Institute (IOI) Malta through their training programmes at the Foundation for International Studies Malta, University of Malta (UM), Aachen Technical University (RWTH), Germany and Dalhousie University (Dal), Canada, thanks to the Commonwealth Secretariat and Canadian International Development Agency scholarships (CIDA). Sunil later studied sea-use law, economics, and policy-making from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1988, where he held the ODA-SSS (DFID), Suntory- Toyota, Vera Anstey, Canadian IDRC, and LSE 1980s Fund Scholarships until 1994. From 1994 to 2018, he taught Marine and Environmental Policy at the University of Hull in the UK. He has also served on the board of this University’s three apex bodies- Council, Court, and Senate. In 1996, he was awarded scholarships by the IOC/UNESCO and the EMECS in Kobe, Japan, to study Environmental Economics and Policy Analysis at Harvard University’s Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Sunil has been, inter alia, on the Specialist Group on Ocean, Coasts and Corals of the Commission on Environmental Law (CEL) of the International Union for the Conservation of the Nature (IUCN), the International Committee on International Law for Sustainable Development of the International Law Association (ILA), the UK All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Marine and Coastal Issues, the Working Group on Integrated Coastal Zone Management of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), the Inter-Sessional Correspondence Group on Deep Sea Marine Protected Areas of the Oslo and Paris Commission (OSPAR), and the Ocean Resources Committee of the Society for Underwater Technology (SUT). He has served as a trustee, governor and director of several public bodies such as the Commonwealth Argosy Foundation, the Ferens Education Trust, the Greenwich Forum, and the Pocklington School Trust, among others. He is also a Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow.

Sunil was born in India in 1955 and has lived in the United Kingdom since 1988. Sunil’s key mottos for everything he professes are ‘Each one of us must be that agent of change for a better world’ and ‘Do the right thing because it is the right thing to do’.