J. Nathaniel Holland received his B.S. degree in 1993 from Ferrum College in southwestern Virginia with majors in biology and environmental science, and minor studies in chemistry and philosophy. At Ferrum, he pursued his organismal interest in bats through studies of habitat choice by tropical bats in Costa Rica and of roosting and foraging behavior of an endangered species in Virginia. He then attended the University of Georgia, where under the supervision of Dr. D.A. Crossley he obtained an M.S. degree in entomology studying the effects of above-ground herbivory on plant carbon allocation and soil food webs at the Odum School of Ecology's (formerly the Institute of Ecology) agroecosystem facility. Holland completed a Ph.D. in the Department of Biology at the University of Miami in 2001. He and his advisor, Dr. Ted Fleming, discovered the pollinating seed-consuming mutualism between senita cacti and senita moths in the Sonoran Desert. In 2001 Holland was awarded a National Parks Ecological Research (NPER) Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ecological Society of America. As a postdoctoral fellow, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Judith Bronstein in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. In 2003 he accepted an assistant professor position in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University. Holland continues to use the senita and other plant-animal mutualisms in the Sonoran Desert as model systems to develop theory and investigate the influences of species interactions on the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of populations and communities. .