Jared Diamond
Wednesday,
April 11, 2007
The Dan and Gail Cook Lecture
Jared Diamond is an internationally distinguished scientist, societal historian, and author. His best-selling book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 and Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize. The latest of his seven books is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005. Diamond's works in popular science combine the fields of anthropology, biology, linguistics, genetics, and history. In them, he challenges common assumptions about the rise and fall of civilizations and examines the continued gulf between rich and poor in the global community.
Formerly a professor of physiology at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Medicine, Diamond currently is professor of geography at UCLA. His honors include Japan's International Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and the National Medal of Science, the highest civilian scientific award in the United States. He has participated in field projects in North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. His fieldwork includes 17 expeditions to New Guinea to study ecology and evolution of birds. He earned a B.A. degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in physiology and membrane biophysics from Cambridge University in England.