Gregg Herken is an American historian and museum curator who is Professor Emeritus of modern American diplomatic History at the University of California, Santa Cruz & Merced, whose scholarship mostly concerns the history of the development of atomic energy and the Cold War.

[2] In 1974, he received a Ph.D. in modern American diplomatic history from Princeton University.

[3] Herken held teaching positions at California State University, San Luis Obispo, Oberlin College, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology, and was a Fulbright-Hays senior research scholar at Lund University.

[3] Since 2005, Herken has been a Senior Fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

In 2003, Herken's book Brotherhood of the Bomb, for which he received a MacArthur Grant to write, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history.