Steven L. Stephenson is a research professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he served as director of a worldwide project funded by the National Science Foundation to document the distribution of all the slime molds and their relatives. Prior to this he taught biology at Fairmont State University in West Virginia for nearly three decades. Dr. Stephenson has studied fungi and slime molds on six continents in climates ranging from the tropics to the polar regions of both the Arctic and Subantarctic. He is author/co-author of numerous publications, including Myxomycetes: A Handbook of Slime Molds (Timber Press, 1994) and Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of the World (Timber Press, 2003).