John Bohannon is a biologist and journalist. After embedding in southern Afghanistan in 2010, he engineered the first voluntary release of civilian casualty data by the US-led military coalition. As a visiting scientist at Harvard, he studies the evolution of fame using data provided by Google. His research on the blurring line between the cuisine of man and pet caused Stephen Colbert to eat cat food on television.

Using an alter ego known as the Gonzo Scientist, he runs the “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest for the journal Science, an international competition for scientists to explain their research with interpretive dance. He is the coauthor with Isabella Rossellini of Animals Distract Me, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. He has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Oxford.