Emily Penn is an expedition leader and oceans advocate with extensive exploration experience in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. You might remember her from the intro video shown before $4 Monday.
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Apple is famously selective about the people they feature in their promotional material-and Penn has an impressive résumé. After graduating with a degree in Architecture from Cambridge, she spent a year as Operations Manager aboard the record-breaking biofueled powerboat Earthrace, where she traveled 25,000 miles, visited 120 cities, and ran a campaign to promote the use of alternative fuels.
In 2010 she hitchhiked across the Pacific Ocean on freighter ships to the United States, where she worked with the 5 Gyres Institute in California on the first ever comprehensive study of plastic in the world's oceans. Another sailing voyage led Penn to co-found a new organization-Pangaea Explorations-which takes normal people, journalists, artists, and scientists to remote parts of the world to study critical environmental issues like coral reef biodiversity and plastic pollution, according to $4 "The ocean, for me, is the lungs of our planet. The health of the ocean is absolutely essential to the health of us as human beings," Penn says. "Pangaea runs a sailing expedition vessel to help scientists collect marine debris all around the world."
At 23, she became the first woman to become $4, awarded by HRH Princess Royal in recognition of Penn's skills and expertise as a skipper. Penn has since led several scientific expeditions on Pangaea's 72ft sailing boat Sea Dragon.
Penn's next step is to return to the Pacific to develop a zero-waste system for a line of remote islands, and she's using Apple products to do it.
Penn says: "There's a variety of apps I use everyday: iNavX is essential for us to be able to navigate the vessel. Marine Debris Tracker allows you to enter the marine debris you find into a global database so we can start to build a bigger picture of this problem around the world. I think these apps are essential to allow us to bring change to what's going on in the ocean."