Matthew J. James

Matthew J. James is a professor of geology and paleontology at Sonoma State University in northern California. He grew up on the leeward side of Oahu in Hawaii where he attended school from kindergarten through college. He attended the University of Hawaii (BS Biology, high honors), the Friday Harbor Laboratories (summer 1976), the University of Arizona, Baja field course (summer 1978), Oxford University (summer 1982), the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (1977-79), and holds a Ph.D. in Paleontology from the University of California at Berkeley (1987). Since 2001, he has been a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. In 2011, his writing about the schooner EARNEST/ACADEMY won the Karl Kortum Award for Maritime History from the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library. He is a science advisor to the Galįpagos Conservancy, and is a Governing Member of the General Assembly of the Charles Darwin Foundation. During 2016-17 he is serving as the president of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been conducting research on and has been writing about the Galįpagos Islands since 1982 in the areas of marine invertebrate paleontology, conservation, and human history.