When I first met Andrea Heather Go, as a guest and visitor of what later became Thai Ocean Academy, she was instantly and completely 100% authentic to the person she remained to be for every single moment I knew her after that. An entirely too energetic, ‘bubbly’, curious, relentless and an entirely open individual that saw only the vibrant colour in the world and rarely paid attention to the shadowed corners.  When I first met Andrea Heather Go, she was embracing her passion for something new, while recovering from the loss of someone close to her who introduced to her the world of marine science.

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Over the following three and a half years, the whirlwind of motion, motivation and wonder that she was rapidly soaked up all experiences and knowledge offered to her. She took steps towards a growing passion to let wildlife conservation (in all its forms, from big cats to tiny snails) slowly become a larger and larger part of her life. With ATMEC, she learned reef monitoring, coral restoration, building artificial reefs and joined on various expeditions (within and outside of Thailand) to study coral spawning. She was fascinated, and afraid of what being a ‘scientist’ would be like, and what it would take to embrace this side of her alongside her role as a well-established designer of jewellery for clients around the world.

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In 2022, her close friend and gemology mentor Vincent Pardieu joined Andrea and myself for dinner to develop a project that would combine her passions of gemstones and marine biology to explore the biology of a very special and rare pearl. Andrea embraced this topic whole-heartedly (because she was physically incapable of embracing something half-heartedly) and spent over a year of her life collecting information and having conversations with people across the country and even the wider Southeast Asian region. In this time, she learned a huge amount about how local communities, tourists and conservationists benefit from one another and often need each other to drive progress towards a more sustainable future.

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In 2023, Andrea was one of a small group of us representing ATMEC to attend the Asia-Pacific Coral Reef Symposium (APCRS) in Singapore, where she got her most in-depth taste of what careers in marine biology and conservation can look like. She followed her own path and her own interests and independence throughout the week-long experience. Throughout the time I knew her, she was averse to being the centre of attention or receiving any recognition for her contributions and endless generosity (as many students and interns we had at Koh Mun Nai can attest to). She just put her head down and kept pushing towards her own goals to make the lives of other people and critters, better. And then while on holiday just before Christmas 2024, she died.

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The thing is, she worked hard and embraced so much of the curiosity and community around her, no matter who or where, or why. So, it doesn’t surprise me at all that without anyone knowing who she was, Andrea attended and contributed to a workshop at APCRS themed around the role of community-based management for conservation. She wanted to learn and share what she could, always without any expectations. In April 2025, the conversations and results from that workshop were synthesised and published in the magazine by the International Coral Reef Society (page 37). She never got to see this, but it is with great honour and great privilege that I can say that Andrea Heather Go became a marine biologist, and it breaks my heart that she never knew or accepted that she had achieved this.

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To absolutely everyone who knew her, Andrea left a permanent and unyieldingly brilliant impression, superior to any of the gemstones she ever worked with. I’m so proud of everything she achieved and there’s so much more to her story than I can ever capture here, it’s taken me almost half a year just to get this far.

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I miss you Toon, always and forever.

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-           Doc.

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