The science Dunn mentors attempts to use many different approaches to understand the stories of the species all around us and how they have changed or might change in the future. Often those species are ants and their societies, other times mosquitoes and the diseases they vector or rare carnivores and the parasites they host. Central to all of this work is the sense that much of what we assume someone else knows (such as which species live around us in cities) is totally unknown. The unknown is large and wonderful and Dunn and his collaborators, students, postdocs and other researcher scientists, love to spend their days in it.

Dunn’s writing focuses on the stories of the scientists behind the science, who they are, what they do and how and why they did it. Dunn’s writing has appeared in Natural History, BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and other magazines. His first book, Every Living Thing, was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History writing. His new book, out in the spring of 2011, The Wild Life of Our Bodies, examines the long human relationship with other species (be they tapeworms or tigers) and how changes in those relationships are affecting our health and well being.

Rob Dunn is currently a biologist and writer in the Department of Biology at North Carolina State University.