Luciano Beheregaray is a Professor of Biodiversity at Flinders University. His research interests are in conservation and evolutionary genetics of aquatic animals. His work illustrates how natural history can stimulate public interest about the importance of biodiversity. He has worked in several remote ecosystems around the world and his research has featured in >1200 media releases. In Amazonia, he pioneered the combination of genome scans with landscape genetics to clarify adaptive divergence and speciation. In the Galápagos, he produced groundbreaking findings about the evolution of one of the world’s most fascinating radiations. In Australia, he coordinates a multi-institutional team that is linking the distribution and adaptive potential of marine and freshwater biodiversity with key environmental and anthropogenic factors. Luciano received his BSc and MSc at University of Rio Grande (Brazil) and PhD at Macquarie University (Sydney, 2001). He worked at Yale University as a 'Gaylord Donnelley Environmental Research Fellow' before starting a tenure position at Macquarie in 2003, followed by a move to Flinders in 2009. In the last ten years his lab produced 150+ papers and graduated 15 PhD students. He is currently an ARC Future Fellow with a focus on ecological genomics of fish.