Brad Balukjian (born October 16, 1980) is an American writer and science professor. He is best known for his memoir ''The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife.''

Background

Balukjian grew up in Greenville, Rhode Island. He went to college at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

, where he graduated in 2002, and got his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from

UC, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

. He teaches natural history at Merritt College in Oakland, California, where he founded the Natural History & Sustainability program.

Career

In 2015, Balukjian opened a pack of unopened baseball cards from 1986 and decided to track down all of the players inside. His journey became the memoir ''The Wax Pack'' (2020), which went on to become a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Balukjian said his book was rejected by 38 publishers before the University of Nebraska Press offered him a contract. Balukjian is a freelance writer for The Smithsonian
Alta Online
and other publications. His work includes a science piece about earwig penises for The Smithsonian and decoding the science of the stolen base. Balukjian's second book, The Six Pack, explores the where are they now story of former WWE wrestlers.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Balukjian, Brad Merritt College faculty 1980 births Living people 21st-century American male writers 21st-century American biologists 21st-century American memoirists Writers from Greenville, South Carolina UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources alumni Duke University alumni