John Bohannon is an American science journalist and biologist with a PhD in molecular biology from Oxford University, best known for a long run of investigative and stunt journalism for Science magazine and for leading data and partnerships work at the AI startup 📝Quicksilver (now Primer).
Bohannon's published work has included an extensive investigation of fee-charging open-access scientific journals — in which he submitted hundreds of fabricated papers and found roughly sixty percent of them accepted with no peer review — and a deliberately p-hacked chocolate weight-loss study that triggered a wave of credulous mainstream coverage and became a teaching case in junk-science media literacy. Adjacent projects include the "Dance Your PhD" contest he founded at gonzolabs.org, the Science Hall of Fame collaboration with the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, embedded reporting with NATO forces in Afghanistan, work with the operator of Sci-Hub to publicly release a 28-million-download dataset, and stage appearances at TED, TEDxBrussels, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show. He has held a visiting-scholar appointment at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.