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Daniel Hunt Janzen is an evolutionary ecologist, biologist, and conservationist and the son of a previous Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. He divides his time between his professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been since 1976, and his research and field work in Costa Rica, where he is an ad honorem technical advisor for two long-term and long-range projects, which he conceived and initiated in the early 1970s: Area de Conservación Guanacaste, one of the oldest, largest and most successful habitat restoration project in the world, 1.430 km², located just south of the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border, between the Pacific Ocean and the Cordillera de Tilaran; and the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, a research organisation that has taken the task of inventorying, cataloguing and describing the country's gigantic natural endowment.
Janzen obtained his B.Sc. degree in Biology from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1961, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. In 1963 he attended as a student a two-month course in tropical biology taught in several field sites throughout Costa Rica. This Advanced Science Seminar in Tropical Biology was the precursor for Fundamentals in Tropical Biology course offered by the Organization for Tropical Studies, a consortium of several North American and Costa Rican universities. He went back in 1965 as an instructor and has lectured in at least one of the three yearly courses every year since. Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania he taught at the University of Kansas, the University of Chicago and at the University of Michigan. Janzen has also held teaching positions in Venezuela, and in Puerto Rico. Through these teaching positions, continuous association with OTS, and numerous publications, Janzen has been in contact with and influenced the thinking and ideas of many of the researchers and students of tropical ecology and conservation in the western hemisphere during the last 40 years.
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