Neven grew up in Montana and Wyoming and spent most of her landlocked childhood in the swimming pool where she fell in love with being in the water. In college, she had the opportunity to develop her initial scuba skills over an entire semester during her SSI Open Water course, although she didn’t truly fall in love with scuba and the ocean until several years later, as she had a fun and exciting professional mountain biking career in the interim. When she got back into diving, she really went for it, though, exploring incredible diving in Roatan, Egypt, Indonesia, Socorro, the cenotes in Mexico, and Cocos Island, to name a few. She really fell in love with the incredible oceanic ecosystem but most especially with corals and sharks. Additionally, given that Neven has her PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering, it didn’t take long for the appeal of technical diving to draw her in, too, given the meticulous nature of the planning and calculations required for longer, deeper dives and cave diving. At one point, she decided to take a sabbatical from her biomedical engineering career to focus on her love of diving and moved to Indonesia to become a diving professional. Now that she’s back in CO full time, she truly loves sharing her passion for diving, traveling, and the incredible ocean environment with all her students at Ocean First!