An uncle, husband, naturalist, and award-winning professor, Noah Whiteman was raised in northeastern Minnesota, first at the edge of Lake Superior in Duluth along southern reaches of the boreal forest and then deep in the Sax-Zim Bog.
Most Delicious Poison is Whiteman's first book and the hardcover was published in North America on October 24, 2023 by Little, Brown Spark.
He is Professor of Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Integrative Biology and Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley where he runs a basic research laboratory that studies plant-animal coevolution. At Berkeley, he is also affiliated with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, Center for Computational Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and Jepson and University Herbaria, and is Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty in 2016, he was Assistant and Association Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.
He received a B.A. cum laude and with Distinction from Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota in 1998. In the summers during college he worked as a naturalist guide at Gunflint Lodge on the Minnesota-Ontario border and for a northern tallgrass prairie restoration project in Collegeville. He then received his M.S. in aquatic entomology from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2000. For his doctoral research in tropical biology, he studied coevolution between the native birds of the Galápagos Islands and their parasites with Patty Parker, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 2006. He was Head Teaching Fellow for Animal Behavior at Harvard University in 2006 where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award. From 2007-2010 he completed a joint postdoctoral research fellowship in genetics, genomics and molecular biology at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology with Professor Naomi Pierce and at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School with Professor Fred Ausubel.