John’s passion is conserving aquatic environments and the fishes that live there. John has been enjoying and learning about fish and the rivers and lake they inhabit for over 60 years, beginning as a kid in New York State angling, snorkeling, canoeing, and keeping fish in aquariums, then as a biology major in college and graduate school, finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 with an emphasis on fish ecology, then as a fisheries research scientist and supervisor for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for almost 33 years before retiring in 2017. He has been an ichthyologist and instructor at the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum from the early 1980’s up through the present, where he is Curator of Fishes. John is a charter member of Wisconsin’s Green Fire and former co-chair of the Fisheries Work Group.