Robert Duane Ballard (born June 30, 1942) is a retired United States Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is most known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy\'s PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew. He leads ocean exploration on E/V Nautilus.\n', '

Ballard grew up in Pacific Beach, San Diego, California to a mother of German heritage and a father of British heritage. He has attributed his early interest in underwater exploration to reading the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, living by the ocean in San Diego, and his fascination with the groundbreaking expeditions of the bathyscaphe Trieste.\n', '

Ballard began working for Andreas Rechnitzer\'s Ocean Systems Group at North American Aviation in 1962 when his father, Chet, the chief engineer at North American Aviation\'s Minuteman missile program, helped him get a part-time job. At North American, he worked on North American\'s failed proposal to build the submersible Alvin for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.\n', '

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