G. Pascal Zachary

Biography

G. Pascal Zachary is a writer, teacher and an independent scholar.

Zachary consults on African affairs for non-profits organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He often publishes on African themes; for links to his recent writings, see www.africaworksgpz.com. Zachary also writes and lectures on migration, identity, and diversity; technological change, and innovation; and globalization, international relations and political reform. He is director of Innovation Media Africa, a consultancy with offices in Berkeley, California and Nairobi, Kenya.

From 1989 to 2001, Zachary was a foreign correspondent and senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal. He contributed the “Ping” column on technological change to The New York Times in 2007 and 2008. He is the author of four books, including The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy (2003), Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997) and Married to Africa, a memoir, to be published in January 2009 by Scribner.

Zachary teaches reporting and writing at Stanford University and is a fellow at the Institute for Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University. Born in Brooklyn, Zachary was raised on Long Island and studied philosophy at the University of Albany. He moved to northern California in 1978, where he joined the last staff of the Berkeley Barb, a dissenting weekly, and later the worker-owned Santa Barbara News & Review, He also worked as a writer and editor for Williamette Week (Portland, Ore.), the San Jose Mercury News and Time Inc.’s Business 2.0 magazine. Over 25 years, he has published articles in many newspapers, magazines and journals, including Foreign Policy, Fortune, In These Times, Mother Jones, Project Syndicate, The New Republic, Wilson Quarterly and Wired.