About the Author

Caren Cooper is an associate professor of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University, part of the Chancellor's Faculty Excellence Program in Leadership in Public Science, and assistant head of the Biodiversity Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. She studies bird ecology, conservation, and management through the use of citizen science. She served as an advisor to the public television documentary mini-series The Crowd & The Cloud. She is a blogger at the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Discover and guest blogger at Scientific American, and she is director of partnerships at SciStarter.com.