Sherburne Friend Cook was a physiologist by training, and served as professor and chairman of the department of physiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a noted pioneer in population studies of the native peoples of North America and Mesoamerica and in field methods and quantitative analysis in archaeology. Cook studied at Harvard University and served in France during World War I. He completed his Ph.D. thesis, The Toxicity of the Heavy Metals in Relation to Respiration, in 1925. He taught physiology at Berkeley from 1928 until his retirement in 1966.