Michael J. Lannoo is Professor of Anatomy, Cell Biology, and Physiology at Indiana University and an affiliate of the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois, Purdue University, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In 2001 Lannoo received the Parker/Gentry Award for Excellence and Innovation in Conservation Biology through The Field Museum. 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.” (See https://www.parkergentry.fieldmuseum.org/award-recipients.). In addition to his work in temperate ecosystems, Lannoo has done field research in tropical and polar environments including Jamaica, Brazil, Venezuela, Antarctica, and Alaska. He is the author/editor of over 120 scientific papers and ten popular scientific books, including Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism (2010), This Land is Your Land: The Story of Field Biology in America (2018), and most recently, co-authored with Marty Crump, Women in Field Biology: A Journey into Nature (2022). He is currently working on a project overlaying the emergence of cognition on the evolution of vertebrate brain structure.