Steven J. Cooke is a Canada Research Professor in the Institute of Environmental and Interdisciplinary Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He works at the interface of the natural and social sciences, where the significance, impact and interdisciplinarity of his contributions have been recognized by Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list since 2019 with over 1200 peer reviewed papers (life-time), more than 70,000 Google Scholar citations, and an H Index of 128. His work is focused on wild fishes along the entirety of the fundamental-applied continuum, with an emphasis on solving complex conservation problems. He is Founding Director of the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Informed Conservation which conducted evidence syntheses to support environmental decisions. Cooke is the Chair of the Board of Technical Experts for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Past President (2024) of the Society for Canadian Aquatic Sciences and serves on the Science Advisory Board for the Alberta Minister of Environment (2021-2026) and as Secretary for the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence (2022-2026). Cooke has received a number of awards including the LeCren Medal from the Fisheries Society of the British Isles (2022), the Ricker Resource Conservation Award from the American Fisheries Society (2022), and the Zoological Society of London Marsh Award for Aquatic Conservation (2021). In 2018, Cooke served as the T.D. Walter Bean Visiting Professor in Environment at the University of Waterloo, in 2019 was the Robin Welcomme Visiting Professor in Inland Fisheries at Michigan State University, in 2023 was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 2024/2025 is a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University.