Professor David Sims is Professor of Marine Ecology in the School of Ocean and Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (NOCS), University of Southampton, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Marine Biological Association (MBA) Laboratory, Plymouth. He is a world-leading marine biologist having conducted pioneering shark tracking research for the past 25 years (see feature in Science 2023). He has made fundamental contributions to understanding behaviour, movements and ecology of threatened oceanic predators (e.g. Nature 2008, 2010, 2019, 2023). He has developed new technology and analytical methods at the forefront in identifying essential habitat and global space-use patterns of vulnerable shark populations. In 2016 Sims initiated the ‘Global Shark Movement Project’ (www.globalsharkmovement.org) – a collaboration of 150 scientists from 26 countries – to collate shark satellite tracks globally with environmental and threat data within a single database. This led to the first worldwide estimate of how many and for which species pelagic shark habitats were overlapped by high levels of fishing effort (Nature 2019, 2021a,b). His leadership of this international research team for sharing big data has led to quantifying both spatial and temporal overlap of predator habitats with anthropogenic threats including fishing, collisions with ships and climate change, which is resolving priority target areas for spatial conservation. His research has contributed to national, regional and international protection of endangered sharks. Prof Sims has been awarded 45 competitive research grants totalling £21M, including a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant in 2020. With Dr Queiroz’s research group, the team have developed novel bio-logging instruments – including the Dissolved Oxygen Measuring (DOME) archival tag – to track simultaneously predator movements and changing environments (oxygen, temperature) to quantify threshold responses to hypoxia. Prof Sims and Dr Queiroz have also developed the first multivariate models of shark responses to deoxygenating environments (eLife 2021) and global shark/shipping collision-risk metrics (PNAS 2022), results which have already contributed to species conservation. Prof Sims has authored over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers including publications in Nature (14 papers), PNAS (7) and Science (4). His research has been recognised with international awards, including the ZSL Marsh Award for Marine Conservation (2019), Member of Academia Europaea (2016), the Stanley Gray Silver Medal (2008) of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology, and the FSBI Medal of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles (2007) “for exceptional advances in the study of fish biology and/or fisheries science”.