Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is an American scientist and author whose career has spanned physiology, ornithology, ecology, and anthropology. He completed his doctorate in physiology at Cambridge University and has spent decades conducting field research in New Guinea, where his observations of local communities first prompted the questions that would animate Guns, Germs, and Steel. He is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1998 and was adapted into a PBS documentary in 2005. Diamond's other major works include The Third Chimpanzee, an examination of human evolution, and Collapse, which analyzes why some societies fail while others endure. He remains one of the most widely read popular scientists working in the tradition of broad synthetic nonfiction.