Gregg Herken is an American historian and museum curator who is Professor Emeritus of modern American diplomatic History at the University of California, Santa Cruz & Merced, whose scholarship mostly concerns the history of the development of atomic energy and the Cold War.[1]
In 1969, Herken received a B.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz.[2] In 1974, he received a Ph.D. in modern American diplomatic history from Princeton University.[3]
Herken held teaching positions at California State University, San Luis Obispo, Oberlin College, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology, and was a Fulbright-Hays senior research scholar at Lund University.[2][3] During 1988–2003 he was a senior historian and curator of military space, as well as chairman of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.[2] He also served on the U.S. government's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments during 1994–95.[3] Since 2005, Herken has been a Senior Fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
In 2003, Herken's book Brotherhood of the Bomb, for which he received a MacArthur Grant to write, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history.[2]
