Passion for ships design and naval architecture brought me to MARIN in 1997. During the first 12 years I have been in charge of managing contractual research in the area of seakeeping on behalf of shipyards and ship designers from all the over the world. Powering and manoeuvring expertise came along my route as well in order to be able to provide advice at early concept level. In this period I also published results of research projects on variety of subjects such as dynamic stall of fin stabilisers sloshing in internal tank risk of parametric roll comfort onboard yacht or forensic investigation on the Derbyshire sinking.In this period I also worked as parttime associate professor at the University of Toulon in France for Hydrodynamic in Ship Design. Sharing knowledge and creating enthusiasm of new generation maritime engineers have been a great and valuable experience.Since 2010 I am in charge of the Ships department of MARIN where we realise about 200 contractual research projects per year as well as applied research and open innovation studies. The Ships department of MARIN is truly a great team of motivated professionals dedicated to make ships better from concept to operations. The availability of a wide variety of selfdeveloped tools numerical and experimental makes us aware of the range of validity of each method and stress us to be critical on the interpretation of the results.We must remain sharp on what we propose to our clients in order to match their expectations and adapt to their constraints in terms budget or planning. Getting the best of our expertise tools and methods to help shipyards ship designers and ship owners making the right decision during innovation phase new build of refit projects is what drives us all.One of the most important challenge in the maritime sector is the necessary and never urgentenough transition towards renewable marine energy production its storage and distribution and the use of sustainable propulsion for transport and shipping. Making ships better by use of environmental forces such as wind rethinking the energy storage and power generation without use of fossil fuels are among the top priorities we have set for the coming years. The integration of sustainable power solutions within an optimised hydrodynamic design is going to revolutionise ship design and concept methodologies. In order to tackle this challenge and think solutions rather than issues we broaden our expertise within the Ships department towards power generation systems and their integration with hydrodynamics. To promote innovation and collaboration to sail this transition with the whole sector we created the Blue Forum in 2012 a platform to share knowledge and start joint industry projects. The Blue Forum meets yearly during the BlueWeek where I can warmly welcome you as chairman. In order to act further on this topic I am since 2019 member of the European Sustainable Shipping forum and member of the Waterborne platform Transport shipping both initiatives of the European Commission.