Matt Forister is a professor of insect ecology at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he has been since 2008.  Matt grew up near Sacramento, California, got a degree in English from the University of San Francisco, and then spent two years in the Peace Corps, in Ukraine.  He worked with Dr Art Shapiro at UC Davis for his PhD, and then did a postdoctoral position in quantitative genetics at Stony Brook University in New York before moving to Reno.  Although trained as an evolutionary ecologist, much of Matt’s professional time now involves monitoring butterflies in the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin and serving as editor-in-chief for the Journal of Lost Species.