In the 2nd week of 2025, Sequoia’s President & CEO, Ole Mikkelsen, travelled to Xiamen in Southern China to meet up with Jerry Li from our Chinese distributor, CHORES. Their purpose: To participate in XMAS 14-17 January 2025.
XMAS of course is short for ‘Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences’, and is an international conference and exhibit on marine science that began in 2014. More than 1,700 scientists from 36 countries participated, and there were ~800 oral and ~750 poster presentations.
Ole and Jerry were there primarily to catch up on the science and exhibit. They had a good week catching up, and discussing LISST applications with a lot of Chinese customers; old and (hopefully!) future.
The exhibit hall got busy at times!
Sequoia’s booth at a quiet moment.
Jerry from CHORES, Sequoia’s long-term (25+years) distributor in China discussing LISSTs with Chinese scientists.
Fei Chai, Xiamen University Professor (former University of Maine Professor) with Ole and Jerry. Fei and Ole met each other on a cruise to the Galapagos in 2023 that was organized by a common friend, Curtis Mobley, Sequoia’s VP Science Emeritus (ret’d 2018). They had fun running into each other again!
And of course Jerry and Ole sampled the local cuisine. Here, Ole is trying out the local version of BBQ chicken feet.