G. Pascal Zachary

Writer, historian and specialist in the history and structure of technological change

G. Pascal Zachary is a writer, historian and specialist in the history and structure of technological change across the world.

He is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997) and editor of The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush (Columbia University Press, 2022). He also wrote The Global Me, a study of multicultural identity and social stability in a globalizing world (revised ed, 2003).

Zachary has taught at Arizona State University (2010-2020), Stanford University (2007-9) and the University of California at Berkeley (2001-2).

For the Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation, he performed research on technology and development (2007-2009, 2015-2019) in sub-Saharan Africa. He has made more than 50 research visits to the region. In 2012, he published a volume of essays, Hotel Africa: The Politics of Escape (2012).

In September of 2025, Zachary published his first collection of fiction, 24 romantic adventure stories set in faraway places, entitled, Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain: Stories of Innocence Lost.

Zachary was born in Brooklyn, educated in New York and lives in northern California with his wife, Chizo Okon, of Port Harcourt Nigeria. He chronicled their early adventures together in Married to Africa: A Love Story (2009).

Zachary was a senior writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1989 to 2002 and later published articles in The New York Times, Technology Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic, IEEE’s Spectrum and other publications.