Mary Hagedorn is a physiologist who has pioneered many state-of-the-art techniques that may help save our coral reefs. She received her Ph.D. in Marine Biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is a Research Scientist at the National Zoological Park at the Smithsonian Institution and an Affiliate Faculty at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. She has worked in aquatic ecosystems around the world, and is a successful researcher and active grant writer. In 2000, she received the prestigious George E. Burch Fellowship in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Theoretic Sciences, and in 2005 was nominated as a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. Dr. Hagedorn has developed a conservation program for coral species, using cryobiology, the understanding of cellular systems under cold conditions, and cryopreservation, the freezing of sperm and embryos. In this approach, the embryos and sperm are frozen and placed into liquid nitrogen where they remain frozen, but alive for decades in a genetic bank.