Marking the 'retirement' of Chris Wood from McMaster University.

Professor Chris Wood stands alone as the world's preeminent researcher and authority in the broad field of comparative physiology and biochemistry. His scientific achievements are awe-inspiring – Chris has published over 600 papers (and counting) and has been cited a staggering 20,000 times! For 40 years, Chris has shaped the global evolution of fish physiology research, beginning with his elegant characterization of the autonomic neuronal control of the cardiovascular system and extending to his current focus on the interrelationships between digestion and physiological performance. Throughout his career, he has seamlessly integrated pure and applied research in areas touching on climate change, aquatic acidification and metal toxicity – it is this blend of fundamental and applied research that gives his work such broad appeal. Chris is affectionately known as the 'Yoda' of comparative physiologists, not only because of the uncanny physical resemblance but also because of the fact that he has mentored more than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. These numbers by themselves are staggering, but even more impressive is that roughly 40% of his trainees have gone on to attain academic positions. Thus, nearly single handed, Wood is repopulating the universities of the world with the next generation of comparative physiologists; an illustrated academic genealogy of Chris Wood (1976–2012) is shown in Fig. S1 in the supplementary material. In 2009, a group of physiologists representing some of Chris's past trainees decided it would be fitting to hold a symposium to commemorate his scientific accomplishments and to recognise his looming 65th birthday and pending 'retirement' from McMaster University, Canada. Ultimately, this led to Woodstock 2012 (An Aquatic Exposition) (Knight, 2012), which was attended by 86 delegates representing 16 countries (Figs 1, 2). The symposium was organized into four main themes, representing the key areas in which Chris has worked: (1) ionic and acid–base regulation: fundamental to applied aspects; (2) metals and toxicology; (3) feeding and nitrogen excretion and (4) gas transfer, metabolism and exercise. Each of these areas is represented in the special collection of six papers featured in the current issue of JEB. The paper by Bury and colleagues (Bury et al., 2014) reviews the utility of gill cell cultures for aquatic environmental monitoring and was inspired by the seminal research of Chris and his collaborator Peter Pärt, who first established the gill cell culture model as a tool to evaluate branchial osmoregulation (Pärt et al, 1993; Wood and …