Charles received a MSE of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the University of Michigan and did his undergraduate studies, in Ocean Engineering, at Florida Tech, in Melbourne Florida.
He started his career in the mesmerizing world of manned submersibles with Seamagine Hydrospace where he had the opportunities to be trained as a pilot and instructor. He soon was responsible to lead vehicles production, and then directed the design, fabrication and testing of the company’s first 3-man 1,500ft rated submersible. The Triumph, named Deepsee, by her owners, has made over 3,600 dives before she was decommissioned in 2023.
In 2005, Charles co-founded Bellamare,LLC to support oceanographers and marine scientists. He is responsible for the design and engineering of various projects over the years. Some of the main developments include the ISIIS-DPI, a plankton/particle imaging system, that has been cited in scientific literature over 280 times and dubbed “to have changed the way we do science”. Charles has designed and delivered over a dozen multi-sensing ROTVs. He was the co-creator of the first biodegradable lagrangian drifter, named the “CARTHE drifter”, which was a key instrument used in the largest upper ocean dispersion experiment carried out in oceanography to date (Gulf of Mexico, GLAD experiment). Lately, he has been responsible, in collaboration with Sixclear, for the design of the SIDEKICK underwater bottle, an easy to use, reconfigurable, autonomous data handler.