Thomas Brooks is Chief Scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), based in Gland, Switzerland. His responsibilities include scientific support to the delivery of knowledge products under IUCN standards (such as the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species), maintaining IUCN interaction with peer scientific institutions, and strengthening the Union’s culture of science. Originally from Brighton, UK, he holds a B.A. (Hons) in Geography from the University of Cambridge (1993) and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Tennessee (1998). He has previously worked for The Nature Conservancy (1998–1999), Conservation International (1999–2010), and NatureServe (2010–2012). His background is in threatened species conservation (especially of birds) and in biodiversity hotspots (he has extensive field experience in tropical forests of Asia, South America and Africa). He has authored 255 scientific and popular articles, including 124 indexed in the ISI ‘Web of Science’.