John Pearse was raised in Tucson, Arizona where he worked at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, working on the reproductive ecology of Antarctic sea stars. After teaching at the American University in Cairo, and doing research on kelp forest ecology at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught courses in invertebrate zoology, kelp forest ecology, and intertidal biology for 26 years. After retiring he helped develop an intertidal monitoring program that has been adopted by the National Marine Sanctuaries in California, LiMPETS (http://limpets.noaa.gov). He is the author of numerous research papers, edited a multivolume treatise on the reproduction of marine invertebrates, and he and his wife were coauthors of the textbook "Living Invertebrates." He is past president of the Western Society of Naturalists, Santa Cruz Natural History Museum Association, and the California Academy of Sciences, and is currently president of the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology.