Hugh Possingham is a Professor at The University of Queensland and the Queensland Chief Scientist. Until recently he was the global Chief Scientist of The Nature Conservancy. After completing a PhD at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar he learnt to be a researcher in marine population ecology in Joan Roughgarden’s lab at Stanford. His most notable contribution to marine conservation is the co-development of Marxan, spatial planning software that has informed the placement of most of the marine protected area systems in the world. He can’t swim very well, but they elected him as a US National Academy of Sciences Fellow anyway.