Oliver Burkholder is a 20 year old from Denver, Colorado. Spending summers visiting his grandparents in Long Boat Key, Florida, he spent many hours at Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, shaping his passion for the natural world to be one for the ecosystems of the ocean. He has worked as a facilitator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science since 2022 where he spends most of his time educating his community on the importance of whales. He is now pursuing a bachelor in science in marine biology at Seattle University.

In the summer of 2025, he was involved in helping collect data about Broadnose Sevengill Sharks through a program that gives undergraduates at Seattle University the opportunity to assist graduate students in Oregon State University’s Big Fish Lab. For the summer of 2026, he will be assisting a post doc at the Brosi Lab at University of Washington collect data on bumble bee populations in Mount Rainier National Park. He hopes to pursue a graduate degree focused on either insect conservation, coastal ecosystem restoration, or marine ecosystem conservation.

As he watched the policies that protected the very same ecosystems he has been exploring since childhood be stripped away, Oliver felt powerless as a young adult to do anything about the growing apathy towards nature he was witnessing. This motivated him to join Heirs To Our Ocean’s US Youth Leadership Council’s sixth cohort where he served as the co-chair of the Plastic Pollution Committee. Through that experience, he was able to meet many other amazing youth leaders passionate about the ocean, lead community efforts to hold the brands that caused the plastic pollution we saw accountable, present to a class about the impacts of plastic, and call upon the representatives and senators of his region to advocate for USFWS, NOAA, and FEMA during the appropriations for FY2026. He is excited to use the skills he learned in the US YLC to the IYLC.