Michael is a Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and is the Associate Director of Academics at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. He was born in Moline, Illinois and has a family: his wife Sue and their son Pete, who is an undergraduate at Cornell University. Mike has a B.S. degree in Biology and a M.S. degree in Animal Ecology from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has published over 130 scientific articles and seven books, including “Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism” through the University of California Press. In 2001, Mike received the Parker/Gentry Award for Excellence and Innovation in Conservation Biology from The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL. This award honors “an outstanding individual, team or organization whose efforts are distinctive and courageous and have had a significant impact on preserving the world’s natural heritage, and whose actions and approaches can serve as a model to others” (learn more). Mike has field experience in both tropical (Jamaica, Venezuela) and polar (Antarctica) ecosystems, and well as in his native temperate ecosystems—the wetland and prairies of the Midwestern United States. He has field station experience not only at the Iowa Lakeside Lab (since 1977), but also at Woods Hole (1983), Scripps (1987–’88), and McMurdo (1997–’98). His current research interests center around the conservation biology of amphibians and the nervous and sensory systems of Bering Sea fishes. (October 2014)