Joern Fischer is Full Professor at the Faculty of Sustainability at Leuphana University, Lueneburg (Germany), where he co-heads the Social-Ecological Systems Institute together with Prof. Berta Martín-Lopez. Joern obtained his PhD at the Australian National University in 2004. He continued to work in Australia until 2010. In Australia, most of his work focused on ecological questions related to farming landscapes, including questions related to the restoration and natural regeneration of woody vegetation in heavily cleared landscapes. In 2010, Joern won a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and with this award, moved from Australia to Germany. At this time, his work started to take an explicitly social-ecological perspective. Focusing on central Romania, his research group studied how traditional farming landscapes might be viable for both biodiversity conservation and the people who inhabit these landscapes. Following his work in Romania, Joern continued to deepen the links between the ecological sciences and the social sciences through an in-depth investigation of the intersection of food security and biodiversity conservation in southwestern Ethiopia. From his work on three different continents, Joern has published more than 200 journal articles to date, seeking to make both empirical and conceptual contributions to social-ecologial systems science.