Julius grew up on Easter Island, Chile, where he gained a personal stake in the need for sustainable management of limited natural resources. A natural history enthusiast, Julius is convinced of the importance of building a wide understanding of the natural world to know how to protect it, and he’s consequently sought out every possible opportunity to work in and learn from new ecosystems. He did ecological fieldwork in Panama, northern Italy, and England (where he did his PhD studying resilience to rapid environmental change in wild badgers), studied efforts to reduce human-wildlife conflict in Tanzania, and joined an agriculture and water program evaluation trip to Zimbabwe with his office at USAID. He worked with USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance on water and natural resources management, which had been an opportunity to learn how ecological principles can help serve some of the planet’s most vulnerable populations.