John Terborgh is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at Duke University and has current affiliations with the University of Florida – Gainesville and James Cook University, Cairns, Australia. His work focuses on tropical ecology, particularly plant-animal interactions and trophic cascades. He has conducted research in the West Indies, South America, Africa, Malaysia, and New Guinea and has published around 300 articles and 8 books. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded a Pew Fellowship In 1992 and became a MacArthur Fellow in the same year. He was awarded the Daniel Geraud Elliot Medal by the National Academy of Sciences in 1996. He has served on the boards of numerous conservation organizations and in 1999 he founded ParksWatch, an organization dedicated to monitoring and publicizing the status of parks in developing countries. He has remained active in research and conservation to the present.