BIO

Professor Oren Harman teaches at the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar Ilan University and is Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where he hosts the public series "Talking About Science in the 21st Century" and the Science and Creativity Group . He was trained in history and biology at the Hebrew University, Oxford, and Harvard, and is a historian of science and a writer. He teaches evolutionary theory, history and philosophy of science, and writing. His books include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome (Harvard, 2004), Rebels, Mavericks and Heretics in Biology (Yale, 2008), Outsider Scientists (Chicago, 2013), Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences (Chicago, 2018), Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018, and Handbook of the Historiography of Biology (Springer, 2020). His book The Price of Altruism (W.W. Norton, 2010) (Bodley Head/Random House, 2010) won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Book of the Year in Science and Technology, was nominated for the Pulitzer prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Professor Harman has written widely for popular and professional audiences on genetics, evolution, history and philosophy of science, altruism, biography, and science and mythology. He has been a frequent contributor to The New Republic and Haaretz Magazine, and is the co-creator of the Israeli Oscar-nominated documentary series "Did Herzl Really Say That?". Oren's work has been featured in The New York Times, The London Times, Nature, Science, The Economist, Forbes, Chronicle of Higher Education, Discover, The Huffington Post, New York Review of Books, RADIOLAB and many others. He lectures widely, and has been a guest of the Marine Biological Laboratories, Woods Hole; the Pasteur Institute, Hong Kong; the European Molecular Biology Laboratories, Heidelberg; the Humanities Center at Yale University; The Royal Society of Arts, London; the Department of History of Science, Harvard University; the Edinburgh Book Festival; the World Science Festival, the Oxford Literary Festival, Berwin's Salon, and many others. In 2015 he was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award by his university and in 2019 its Excellence in Research Award. Oren grew up in New York and Jerusalem where he lives with his wife, Yael, and their three little children. He sings bass with the Tel Aviv Chamber Choir.