Heather started working for the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in 1995, as a postdoctoral research scientist, curator of London Zoo Aquarium, Head of Marine and Freshwater Conservation and now as Senior Marine Technical Advisor. Heather is an Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter. She was appointed a National Geographic Fellow in 2019 with a focus on solving ocean plastic pollution and was science co-lead for their 2019 Sea to Source: Ganges expedition. She co-founded Project Seahorse in 1996, the world’s leading authority on seahorses and early pioneer of community-based marine conservation; set up Net-Works, a multi-award winning project that has developed a novel community-based supply chain for discarded fishing nets that are recycled into carpet (recently spun out as social enterprise COAST-4C). Since 2017, Heather has been the lead of the Bertarelli Foundation’s Marine Science Programme, a transdisciplinary research and conservation programme for marine science and conservation focused on the Indian Ocean, involving over 100 researchers from 26 institutions and 10 countries. This programme is an endorsed Action of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and has a strong focus on regional capacity building for marine science.