David Sepkoski is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in History of Science at the University of Illinois.  He specializes in transnational history of biological, environmental, and information sciences in cultural context.

Sepkoski's most recent book, Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity, will be published by the University of Chicago Press.  He is also the author of Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (Chicago, 2012) and Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy (Routledge, 2007), as well as several edited volumes and special journal issues.  

His current research interests include the history of data practices in the natural sciences, the cultural impact of the sciences of "deep time" at the turn of the current millennium, and the history of biological determinism.