Don Johanson fulfilled a childhood dream when in 1974 he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and joined Case Western Reserve University as a junior faculty member. That same year, on a search for hominid fossils at Hadar in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia, Johanson found Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old partial fossil skeleton that changed the conventional account of human evolution. Returning the following year, the group found the remains of at least 13 individuals that Johanson argued were a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, a likely common ancestor to subsequent species of both Australopithecus and Homo. Johanson analyzed the fossils at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where he was appointed curator of physical anthropology in 1975. He went on to found the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, Calif., in 1981 and directed IHO until 2009, moving it to Arizona State University in 1997. Johanson has used the Lucy story extensively to excite and inform the public about human origins research. He has authored or co-authored several books, including Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (1991); Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins (1994); From Lucy to Language (2006); and Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins (2010). His Webby-winning website www.becominghuman.org is used worldwide as a powerful learning tool for students from elementary school through the university level. Today he continues to conduct research at Hadar and teach at ASU. Recipient of many international prizes and awards, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Siena Academy of Sciences. With support from the National Science Foundation, the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation and the National Geographic Society, he has carried out field research in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Tanzania as well as Ethiopia. Twitter