Mike Bruford, University of Cardiff
Mike is a pioneer in the field of conservation genetics. His skillset has equipped him to tackle a diversity of problems in a wide range of taxa, and he has published an impressively large number of papers, with a high proportion of those in the top journals. Mike has led studies on the evolution of domestication and the conservation of the associated genetic variation, the population structure and demography of wild primate populations, identifying units of conservation and using genetic methods to reveal mating systems. In recent years he has been involved in several genome sequencing projects and he is an advocate for using wholegenomic data to make important inferences about population demography and to conserve adaptive potential. At the national level Mike has led on the CryoArks project and raised an initial £1m from BBSRC, to enable the UK research community to curate and biobank thousands of irreplaceable tissue samples of potential conservation significance. Mike is highly collegial and public spirited; he has mentored dozens of scientists from around the globe, including over 50 as PhD students.