Trevor Charles Platt FRS FRSC (August 12, 1942 - April 6, 2020) was a British and Canadian biological oceanographer who was distinguished for his fundamental contributions to quantifying primary production by phytoplankton at various scales of space and time in the ocean.

[2] With the benefit of field and laboratory work conducted by his technical assistant Brian Irwin,[3] who joined the institute in 1966,[4] Platt embarked on studies that led to the fulfillment in 1970 of his PhD thesis (“Some effects of spatial and temporal heterogeneity on phytoplankton productivity”)[5] at Dalhousie University.

Platt's early research[6] was framed by the overarching goals originally envisioned by the founders of the Atlantic Oceanographic Group of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, namely: “to describe pathways and to measure amounts and rates of energy transfer in marine biological communities; and to study the structure and degree of organization of biological systems in the sea”.

[16] By the late 1980s, Platt's research program at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography[17] had reached a stage where the solid foundations built from a close relationship between theoretical developments and observations at sea provided the ready capabilities to embrace the possibilities offered by satellite remote sensing of the ocean.

With his close collaborator Shubha Sathyendranath, Platt successfully implemented the analytical solutions and measurement-driven algorithms at regional and ocean basin scales to compute integrated primary production through the water column.