Speakers
24th IB Asia Pacific Annual Regional Conference
25 – 28 March 2010, Singapore
Wade Davis is an 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. He has received two Honorary Doctorates, from the University of Victoria in 2003, and from the University of Guelph 2008.
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 in eight Latin American nations 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 Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. His latest book is The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, the 2009 Massey lectures. He currently is fulfilling a two-book contract with Knopf (USA) and Bloomsbury (UK). The Blindness of Birds, a history of the early British efforts on Everest, will be published in 2010. Sheets of Distant Rain will follow.
Davis is the recipient of numerous awards including the Gold Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2009), the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorer’s Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary non-fiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorer’s Club, one of 20. 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 Nunuvut and Greenland.
A professional speaker for over 20 years, Davis has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, California Academy of Sciences, Missouri Botanical Garden, Field Museum of Natural History, New York Botanical Garden, National Geographic Society, Royal Ontario Museum, the Explorer's Club, the Royal Geographical Society, the Oriental Institute, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank as well as some 250 universities, including Harvard, M.I.T., Oxford, Yale, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Duke, Vanderbilt, University of Pennsylvania, Tulane and Georgetown. He has spoken at the Aspen Institute, Bohemian Grove and on numerous occasions for the Young President’s Organization and at the TED Conference.
In 2009 he will deliver the Massey lectures, one of Canada’s most prestigious public intellectual forums. Davis has recently completed a new four-hour series for the National Geographic, Ancient Voices/Modern World, which was shot in Australia, Mongolia, and Colombia. It is currently airing worldwide on the National Geographic Channel as the second season of Light at the Edge of the World.
When not in the field, Davis and his wife Gail Percy divide their time between Washington, D.C. and the Stikine Valley of northern British Columbia. They have two children.
