Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005).

Originally trained in physiology, Diamond’s work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been described as “America’s best-known geographer”.

Diamond earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in 1958 and a PhD on the physiology and biophysics of membranes in the gall bladder from the University of Cambridge in 1961.