Wade Davis, PhD

Wade Davis is Professor Emeritus Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. From 2014 to 2024 he served as Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk. Between 2000 and 2013 he was Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” 

An ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland. 

Davis is the author of 385 scientific and popular articles and 24 books, published in 23 languages, including the international bestsellers The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), One River (1996), The Wayfinders (2009), and Into the Silence (2011), which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the top award for nonfiction in the English language. Recent books include Magdalena:River of Dreams (2020) and Beneath the Surface of Things: New and Selected Essays (2024).

To learn more about Wade Davis work, go to daviswade.com