Norman Myers was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire and attended Keble College in Oxford. He is a British environmentalist and authority on biodiversity and is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is currently a professor and Visiting Fellow at Green College in Oxford, and holds visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell and Stanford. Myers has studied the mass extinction of species and problems of tropical deforestation and through his research eventually developed the concept of biodiversity hotspots. He has also written on climate refugees and food and hunger in Sub-Saharan African.