Dr Pat Tanner has been building, repairing and sailing boats for over 25 years, and is currently working as a consultant maritime archaeologist specialising in the reconstruction of shipwrecks. He is a pioneer of 3D scanning full size boats in the field, and developed the laser scanning and digital reconstruction of archaeological boats and ships timbers. Pat completed his PhD in maritime archaeology at the University of Southampton, and has worked on many international projects including a digital reconstruction of the 16th C. Drogheda Boat, the Newport (Wales) Medieval Ship, the Grand Hotel Shipwrecks in Stockholm, the Poole Iron Age logboat, the 14th C. Bremen Cog, the Anglo-Saxon Burial Ship at Sutton Hoo which features in the Netflix documentary “The Dig”, and worked as a visiting Scholar at Ca ‘Foscari University in Venice to collaborate with the Center of Excellence in Digital and Public Humanities of the Department of Humanities, working on the 3D reconstruction of the Roman shipwreck, from the 2nd century AD, in Grado.

In 2022, The Honor Frost Foundation, in cooperation with the Polo Regionale di Trapani e Marsala and Swansea University, awarded him a postdoctoral fellowship to study Archaeological Ship Deformation: the creation and analysis of digital engineering models of support structures in order to analyse, test and design improved cradle supports for shipwrecks on display in museums.