James Dwight Dana was born on February 12, 1813, in Utica, New York.

He was an American geologist, mineralogist, volcanologist, and zoologist. He graduated from Yale College with a degree in science before sailing to the Mediterranean Sea as a teacher of midshipmen in the US Navy in 1833. In 1836 and 1837, he was an assistant professor in the chemical laboratory at Yale and then, for four years, acted as mineralogist and geologist of the United States Exploring Expedition in the Pacific Ocean which also discovered the Antarctic continent. His reports were published in the American Journal of Science and Art, the journal of which he later became joint and chief editor. From 1850 until 1892, Dana was Professor of Natural History and Geology at Yale College. He is responsible for much of the early knowledge of volcanoes, obtained from his time with the US Exploring Expedition and later trips to the Hawaiian Islands in the 1880s. He published over 200 papers and books on mineralogy, geology, zoology, and volcanic studies, including his "Manual of Mineralogy" in 1848, which has been consistently reprinted and is still a standard college text today.

In 1844, he married Henrietta Frances Silliman (1823-1907). He died on April 14, 1895, in New Haven, Connecticut.