A Fulbright Scholar to both India and Malaya, John Gaudet was a writer and practicing ecologist. His early research on papyrus, funded in part by the National Geographic Society, took him to Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia. A trained ecologist with a PhD from University of California at Berkeley, he authored Papyrus: The Plant that Changed the World, and The Pharaoh’s Treasure: The Origin of Paper and the Rise of Western Civilization. His writing also appeared in Science, Nature, Ecology, the Washington Post, Salon and the Huffington Post.