Charles Godfray is a population biologist with broad interests in ecology and evolution. His work has involved experimentation and theory in population and community ecology, and in evolutionary theory. His lab is currently engaged in studies of quantitative food webs, insect-bacteria interactions, and the population and genetic dynamics of mosquitoes that vector human diseases. He has been Hope Professor in the Zoology Department at Oxford University since 2006. Before that he spent twenty years at Imperial College London, latterly as Head of the Biology Department, where he remains an honorary professor. In 1999 he succeeded John Lawton as Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Silwood Park, a post he held until his move to Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and is currently an honorary research fellow at the Natural History Museum and at Rothamsted Research, and a Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He chairs the Lead Expert Group for the UK Government’s Foresight project on the Future of Food and Farming and is currently President of the British Ecological Society.