Richard Pearson is a Professor of Ecology and Director of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, which is a research centre within the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London (UCL). His research focuses on fundamental questions relating to the evolution and conservation of biodiversity, and he has been identified as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers in the fields of environment and ecology. Pearson is on the editorial boards of the journals Global Change Biology and Journal of Biogeography. He is a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Climate Change Specialist Group; has been a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and is a member of the UK Natural Environment Research Council’s Peer Review College. Alongside his research and teaching, Pearson engages in communicating biodiversity research to a general audience, including publishing a non-specialist book on the impact of climate change on biodiversity (Driven to Extinction, Sterling, New York 2011).