David Sepkoski (born January 27, 1972) is an American science historian and college professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

Background and career

Sepkoski was born in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

to paleontologist

Jack Sepkoski Joseph John Sepkoski Jr. (July 26, 1948 – May 1, 1999) was a University of Chicago paleontologist. Sepkoski studied the fossil record and the diversity of life on Earth. Sepkoski and David Raup contributed to the knowledge of extinction events. ...

. His stepmother is the paleomammologist

Christine Janis Christine Marie Janis is a British palaeontologist who specialises in mammals. She is currently based at the University of Bristol. Background Janis earned a bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences and Zoology from the University of Cambridge, a ...

. He received his BA from

Carleton College Carleton College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. Founded in 1866, it had 2,105 undergraduate students and 269 faculty members in fall 2016. The 200-acre main campus is between Northfield and the 800-acre Cowling ...

, his MA from the University of Chicago, and his doctoral degree in science history from the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

. His publications include three books, most recently ''Catastrophic Thinking'', which deals with mass

extinction event An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. I ...

Awards and honors

* 2018 - Thomas M. Siebel endowed Chair of History * 2020 -

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

References

1972 births Living people American historians University of Minnesota alumni University of Chicago alumni University of Chicago faculty Carleton College alumni {{US-sci-historian-stub