John Bohannon

About John Bohannon

John Bohannon is the Director of Science at Primer, an AI startup in San Francisco. Until 2017 he was an investigative journalist and data scientist writing mainly for Science magazine and Wired. He spent the first half of his career as a foreign correspondent, including as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin. His reporting from Gaza won the Reuters-IUCN Media Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting from Europe. While embedded with military forces in Afghanistan he engineered the first voluntary release of civilian casualty data by NATO and the United Nations. As a visiting scholar in the Program in Ethics and Health at Harvard University, he focused on the involvement of doctors and social scientists in the US government’s torture program. He was also the scientific advisor to Isabella Rosselini for “Green Porno” (winner of 4 Webby awards) and “Animals Distract Me” (official selection, 2011 Sundance Film Festival). He is the author of a peer-reviewed study of people’s inability to distinguish pet food from paté, which inspired Stephen Colbert to eat cat food on television. He has a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Oxford.