Amy Akbas (Personal Safety) was born in Portland, Oregon, but her family moved to Manhattan in the first months of her life. Living in a historic district of Manhattan until age three, they moved out to Long Island, where she lived until age twenty-five. Since then, Amy has worked or lived in more than half of the states of our country and worked or visited in nine countries abroad. She has lived in Melbourne for twenty-five years. Amy’s training and working knowledge of safety began in Air Force EOD in the 1980s and continued later in life as a civilian unexploded ordnance disposal technician. A volunteer HAZMAT team member and Community Emergency Response Team member for local Fire Departments, Amy was further trained in mass disaster scenarios, triage and first aid, and how to prioritize and organize tasks in an emergency response situation. In her spare time, she invested twenty-five years to training and teaching self-defense and the martial arts. Amy has instructed classes of many sizes on subjects ranging from meditation, self-defense and spirituality,  to commercial construction safety and explosives handling. In all of these, she sees a primary focus on individual wellness and safety.