The people driving SpeleoDB forward
Our organization brings together passionate individuals from diverse backgrounds, united by a shared vision to revolutionize cave survey and exploration data management.
Board of Directors
Our Board provides strategic guidance and ensures the organization stays true
to its mission of advancing cave exploration and data management.
Alberto Nava
President - Explorer - GUE Technical Instructor
A Venezuelan-American engineer, diver, GUE instructor and explorer based in California. He has over 25 years of experience diving and has completed over 500 underwater cave dives. His longest cave exploration length has been 15,500 feet. Nava and his group of fellow divers enjoy exploring cenotes in the Yucatan region of Mexico. It was on one of these excursions that he and his colleagues discovered Hoyo Negro,or Black Hole. The bottom of Hoyo Negro contained many bones of several Ice-Age megafauna and bones of a young girl who lived 13,000 years ago. They eventually named her Naia. This discovery started one of the most important studies of the first Americans in recent history. From 2011 to 2015, Nava was a National Geographic Explorers Grant recipient. He used the grant to continue diving and photographing Hoyo Negro. His photography is now being used in the innovative labs of the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative at the Qualcomm Institute at the University of California, San Diego to create a unique 3-D experience of Hoyo Negro for those who cannot do the difficult dive and would like to experience and study the space. Nava has also published several papers on diving, underwater mapping, and the discovery of Hoyo Negro.
Nava also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the Simon Bolivar National University in Venezuela and has worked as an engineer for over twenty years.
Jonathan Dekhtiar
Vice-President & Treasurer | Explorer | SpeleoDB Founder
Jonathan Dekhtiar is a deep learning researcher, engineer, and cave explorer. He earned his PhD in Unsupervised Deep Learning for anomaly detection and has been with NVIDIA since 2018, contributing to core GPU-accelerated Python libraries, compilers, and packaging infrastructure. Jonathan played a key role in designing Python software release systems at NVIDIA and is a founding force behind the open-source WheelNext initiative - dedicated to solving modern packaging challenges for the Python and AI communities.
A passionate diver under the GUE banner since 2021 and an active cave diver since 2022, Jonathan now explores remote sections of the Sac Actun cave system in Mexico. His deep respect for exploration and open collaboration inspired him to launch SpeleoDB, an open-source project created by and for the cave diving community. Through SpeleoDB, he aims to empower explorers, researchers, and conservationists with better tools to document, preserve, and share the world’s underwater heritage.