Gregg Herken


Gregg Herken is an American historian and museum curator who is Professor Emeritus of History at University of California, Merced. His scholarship mostly concerns the history of the development of atomic energy and the Cold War. During 1988–2003 he was senior historian and curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2003, his 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.
Herken received his B.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz in 1969 and his Ph.D. in modern American diplomatic history from Princeton University in 1974. He subsequently 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. He also served on the U.S. government's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments during 1994–95.

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