David Blair spent some of his formative years in Africa, collecting freshwater fish and tropical diseases in that order.  He completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, on trematode diseases of farmed trout. Since then he has held academic positions at Townsville in tropical Australia, and in New Zealand.  He continues to investigate parasites, especially trematodes, occurring in all sorts of mainly tropical creatures, from dugongs, turtles and crocodiles to crayfish and isopods. A strong interest in the taxonomy and systematics of trematodes led to his involvement with projects on human lung-flukes (Paragonimus species) in various parts of Asia, notably China, Japan and India, and he has a network of collaborators there. This work had a strong molecular component as well as a traditional "morphological" element. Molecules have led on to projects studying schistosomes, liver flukes and other groups of parasites.  Molecules have also taken David into the fields of bioinformatics and genomics. Mitochondrial genomics was the starting point of this line of work, but David was part of the team that published the entire genome of Schistosoma japonicum and he has also done population-genetic work on this species.