Growing up on a dairy farm just outside of Hamilton, New Zealand, I was about an hour from Raglan’s famous left-hand point break on the west coast but spent more time on the Coromandel Peninsula (also only an hour away) at Whangamata’s friendlier beach breaks. My love for the ocean was forged by dawn surf sessions and afternoon fishing and SCUBA diving trips to offshore islands in the Bay of Plenty. My formal education included an undergraduate degree in Zoology from the University of Auckland and a PhD in Marine Biology from James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. Home is now a small village on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I am a Senior Scientist in the Biology Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Our group at WHOI is dedicated to achieving a rigorous scientific basis for the conservation and sustainable management of fishes throughout the world’s oceans. With colleagues in Australia, France, Portugal and the U.S. we work in local waters off Cape Cod and in Papua New Guinea, the Azores, the Red Sea, the central tropical Pacific Ocean and on the Great Barrier Reef.