Overton Brent Berlin (born 1936) is an American anthropologist, most noted for his work with linguist Paul Kay on color, and his ethnobiological research among the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1964. Until recently, Berlin was Graham Perdue Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, where he was also director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and co-director for the Laboratories of Ethnobiology. His work alongside Paul Kay on the 1969 publication of Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution built on the ideas of Lazarus Geiger in the field of color terminology research and has been highly influential in anthropology, linguistics and cognitive sciences. Berlin and Kay concluded that the number of basic color terms in the world's languages are limited and center on certain focal colors, assumed to be cognitively hardwired. He led the Maya ICGB project, a bioprospecting consortium, supported by the Biodiversity Program for the National Institutes of Health, which was closed in 2001 after accusations of failure to obtain adequate informed consent from the Maya community from which he obtained indigenous knowledge. These allegations were primarily driven by a Canadian-based political activist organization, known at the time as RAFI. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1981. Education Berlin received a BA from the University of Oklahoma in 1959, and an MA from Stanford University in 1960. His Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1964 is in Anthropology. Works in ethnobiology Berlin is well known in the field of ethnobiology, or the study of how people name, use, and organize the names and the knowledge about the plants and animals around them. He also further focused on Folk biology, a sub field of ethnobiology, which refers to the biological classification and reasoning particular to a cultural group. Understanding societies’ interactions with their environment is vital to understanding the culture of the people. Berlin’s contribution to the evolution of ethnobiology as a field has been invaluable to many anthropologists. Considering "a series of landmark publications concerning ethnobiological classification, Berlin has remained a prime architect of the descriptive and analytic frameworks now widely regarded as standard and major theory."(1994) Covert Categories and Folk Taxonomies (1968) In 1968, Berlin, Breedlove and Raven studied the botanical ethnography of the Tzeltal Maya people of Chiapas, Mexico. They published an article titled Covert Categories