John Garcia (June 12, 1917 – October 12, 2012) was an American psychologist, most known for his research on taste aversion. Garcia studied at the University of California-Berkeley, where he received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in 1955 in his late forties. At his death, he was professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, he was an assistant professor at California State University at Long Beach, a lecturer in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, professor and chairman of the Psychology Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Garcia as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth. Early life Garcia was born to a farm family on June 12, 1917, near Santa Rosa, California, and died a world-renowned member of the National Academy of Sciences on October 12, 2012. He was a farmer, a cartoonist, a ship fitter, an Air Corps Cadet, an amateur boxer, a high school teacher and a college professor, as well as a research scientist at Harvard Medical School and the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. During World War II he built submarines for the US Navy, and then enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Garcia was a first-generation American, the son of Spanish immigrants: Sara Casasnovas y Unamuno and Benigno Garcia y Rodriguez. By age 20, he was working as a mechanic making 18-wheeler trucks. A few years later he solved the problem of installing mufflers onto submarines and consequently became a ship fitter. During World War II, he joined the United States Army Air Corps and became a pilot; after persistent nausea, he could no longer fly and he finished his term as an intelligence specialist. When demobilized, he used the G.I. Bill to pay for his college tuition. He attended Santa Rosa Junior College, where he achieved a bachelor's degree. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley where he achieved a master's degree and Ph.D. In 1943, he married Dorothy Inez Robertson. In 1985, after he retired from UCLA, they moved to Skagit County, Washington. After the war, Garcia used the G.I. Bill to go to UC Berkeley where he did radiation and brain