Rob Guralnick was born in a cave and raised by wolves in suburban San Diego, CA. At least the cave was near the beach, which is also where he spent a lot of his time while growing-up. As soon as he was able, he left San Diego to seek his fortunes in the northern part of California. He was slowly civilized during his eleven years in Berkeley, California where he miraculously managed to receive a Bachelors and PhD at the local university there. Rob considers himself something of a polyglot - much of his work focuses on understanding evolution and development of organisms in the context of environmental change. He is also quite interested in informatics and meta-analysis approaches to understanding biodiversity change - again in the context of environmental change. He is now an Assistant Professor and Curator at the University of Colorado Museum and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Despite his best efforts to convince his students to work on molluscs, some insist on examining animals in a small, low diversity clade of Chordates called vertebrates.