Annabelle Nicolas-Kopec

Dr Annabelle Nicolas-Kopec joined ITOPF in January 2011. She is a chartered chemist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). She earned her doctorate in organic chemistry in 2010 and has postgraduate research experience in analytic and synthetic chemistry.

Annabelle has attended many pollution incidents worldwide, including crude oil spills from tankers, bunker fuel spills, and chemical spills, many in highly sensitive areas. Notable incidents include the Tobago incident in 2024, GOLDEN RAY in the USA, CSL VIRGINIA in France, DAWN KANCHIPURAM in India, and the WU YI SAN spill in Republic of Korea. As part of ITOPF's technical advisory role, Annabelle has provided assistance on clean-up techniques, environmental monitoring and claims and compensation following spills in Europe, Africa, North America and Asia. She has also contributed to numerous contingency planning activities including oil spill exercises, drills, inter-governmental workshops. She has presented at a number of international conferences.

In addition to her on-site work, Annabelle is the ITOPF representative at the IMO PPR meetings. She has also been visiting professor at the World Maritime University and an observer at the GESAMP EHS working group.

ITOPF Working Groups

Annabelle is the lead of the New Development Functional Group, tasked with exploring and developing ideas that ITOPF might choose to offer as future services, including topics such as Plastic, Salvage, ESG, Nuclear Propulsion.

She also leads the HNS Working Group. The group strengthens ITOPF's knowledge by improving the level of internal expertise with both internal and external training as well as improving ITOPF visibility on HNS including new Alternative Fuels by increasing interaction with stakeholders on HNS matters.

Languages

• English (fluent)
• French (native)
• Spanish (conversational)
• Italian (basic)

Published Papers

Le Floch. S., Dussauze, M., Merlin, F.-X.,Claireaux, G.,Theron, M., Le Maire, P., Nicolas-Kopec, A. (2014) DISCOBIOL: Assessment of the impact of dispersant use for oil spill response in coastal or estuarine areas. Proceedings of the 41st International Oil Spill Conference (IOSC), Savannah, USA, 5-8 May 2014