David G. Campbell, scientist, educator and author, joined the scientific staff of the New York Botanical Garden after earning a PhD at Johns Hopkins. He spent eight years in the field in the Brazilian Amazon conducting research on the biogeography of trees. In 1987 he joined the sixth Brazilian expedition to Antarctica, studying the life cycles and pathologies of the invertebrate parasites of crustaceans, fish and seals.
He is the author of The Ephemeral Islands: A Natural History of the Bahamas; The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica; Islands in Space and Time, and most recently, A Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia. He is currently Professor of Biology at Grinnell College in Iowa.