We talk to author, scientist and Phillies/Eagles fan Brad Balukjian-PhD in entomology from UC Berkeley. For ten years, Brad taught biology, environmental management, and his favorite, a class on California’s islands, at Laney and Merritt Colleges in California’s Bay Area, where he also founded the Natural History and Sustainability program. His first book, The Wax Pack, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and NPR Best Book of the Year, and his second book, The Six Pack, came out in April 2024 and was not an LA Times bestseller (but it’s still really good, maybe even better than The Wax Pack). He has been published in Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Smithsonian CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Discover, Islands, and others. As part of his PhD research, he discovered and described 17 species of plant bugs in Tahiti, one of which he named for Harrison Ford and another for Kamala Harris. He reviews scientific papers for the academic journal Zootaxa and thinks Zima is prime for a comeback.Brad currently lives in Concord, CA. A member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco since 2018, he is now their head of membership. He is launching a new educational outreach project in 2025 in Tahiti/French Polynesia called the Manumanu Project, teaching fifth-graders about insects to inspire the protection of biodiversity. He is also the CEO of Islephile LLC, a biological consulting company working on the California Insect Barcoding Initiative, a multi-institution effort to provide a DNA barcode for every insect species in California.

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