Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist, historian, and author. He is a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and he has written hundreds of scientific articles and books. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Science, an honor bestowed by the President of the United States and the National Science Foundation. He is currently a professor of geography at UCLA.

He is known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel  (1997), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed  (2005), and Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change (2019).

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.