Professional Bio

Bruce Lewenstein (Ph.D., history and sociology of science, 1987, University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of Science Communication in the Departments of Communication and of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. He works primarily on the history of public communication of science, with excursions into other areas of science communication (such as emerging issues in open-access publishing). He has also been very active in international activities that contribute to education and research on public communication of science and technology, especially in the developing world. Most recently, he was co-chair of a U.S. National Research Council study, Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits, edited by Philip Bell, Bruce Lewenstein, Andrew W. Shouse, and Michael A. Feder (2009).

He is a co-author of The Establishment of American Science: 150 Years of the AAAS (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1999, with Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Michael M. Sokal), editor of When Science Meets the Public (Washington, DC: AAAS, 1992), and co-editor of Creating Connections: Museums and the Public Understanding of Research (Altamira Press, 2004, with David Chittenden and Graham Farmelo). From 1998 to 2003, he was editor of the journal Public Understanding of Science. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

For about 12 years, from 1996 to 2008, Lewenstein helped conduct evaluations of science communication and informal science education programs, often through his consulting company, Seavoss Associates Inc. Since 2008, Seavoss is no longer accepting new clients or engaging actively in evaluation.

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