Wade Davis

Anthropologist and botanical explorer Wade Davis received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. Davis's work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best-seller, which appeared in 10 languages and was later released by Universal Studios as a motion picture. He is author of five other books, including Shadows in the Sun (1998) and One River (1996). Born December 14, 1953, in British Columbia, Davis is a citizen of both Canada and Ireland. He has worked as a guide, park ranger and forestry engineer. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societie