Frederick C. Yeh is an American social entrepreneur and conservation biologist who founded Sea Turtles 911, a non-profit sea turtle rescue and conservation organization that operates in the United States and China. Early life Yeh attended Montgomery County Public Schools, including Thomas S. Wootton High School, and graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Duke University. In 2007, Yeh discovered that endangered sea turtles on Hainan island, China, were being sold illegally for their meat and shell. During an interview with CNN, Yeh described, "I felt really hopeless at that time ... You would see land turtles and freshwater turtles (in the market) and some of those are legal, but when you see a sea turtle it's clearly not supposed to be there and that's shocking to see." This finding was emotionally disturbing to Yeh and became a turning point in his life, which led to the founding of the first non-profit organization working for the advancement of sea turtle protection and conservation in China. Sea Turtles 911 Despite the desperate state of sea turtles in China, Yeh was inspired in 2008 when he saw wild sea turtles undisturbed by people as the animals were naturally basking on public beaches in Hawaii. As Yeh said on a CNN interview, "When you see the sea turtles in Hawaii, how great they are, it's worth it when you can envision that and hope that one day it will happen in Hainan, one day, in China." This experience led Yeh to believe that sea turtles and people could live in harmony and that there was still hope in China because of the successful sea turtle conservation efforts in Hawaii. According to the global authority on nature conservation, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the sea turtles of the Hawaiian Islands were also once under the threat of near extinction, but are now thriving and their conservation status reclassified as "Least Concern" according to the IUCN Red List. Thus, Yeh established Sea Turtles 911 under Hawaiian jurisdiction, and changed the course of his life by moving to China to save the sea turtles he had hopelessly witnessed being sold, earning him the nickname "The unlikely sea turtle savior" by the BBC. Building a floating sea turtle hospital in a Chinese fishing village known for its extensive sea turtle poaching, Yeh makes a point to work with people of all types to support sea turtle