John Pickering has been a naturalist since his childhood in England. He received a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard in 1980 and has lived in Athens since 1984, where he served on the faculty in Entomology and then Ecology at the University of Georgia for 32 years before his "retirement." He is the President of the Polistes Foundation, a 501-c-3 thinktank in Massachusetts. He co-founded the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Discover Life website. His passions include being outdoors, understanding species interactions, and programming computers. He gets up before dawn, when he has fun taking photographs of moths and writing poems. He is developing the Shoal Creek Sanctuary for nature and its surrounding residents and building SHIELD (Species, Health, and Interactions of Ecosystems Linked to Drivers) to tackle some grand challenges in biodiversity science and environmental management. His online albums includes 480,000 images of over 2,800 species from around the world. See https://www.discoverlife.org/who/Pickering,_John.html