Making Science Global:
Reconsidering the Social and Intellectual Implications of the
International Polar and Geophysical Years

Alphabetical List of Presenter Biographies

Dian Olson Belanger is an independent historian. She earned her B.S., summa cum laude, in history from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and an M.A. in American Studies from the George Washington University. Belanger served as an associate curator and technical editor for engineering exhibits at the National Building Museum and as a curatorial associate and docent at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. For a decade she was a national leader of the American Association of University Women. Her most recent work is Deep Freeze: The United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the Origins of Antarctica’s Age of Science (University Press of Colorado, 2006), her third book. Her first, Managing American Wildlife, won the Wildlife Society’s national book award in 1990. Enabling American Innovation: Engineering and the National Science Foundation, opened the door to her present study and her passion for Antarctica.

Noel D. Broadbent is an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Department of Anthropology in the National Museum of Natural History. He was director of the Center for Arctic Cultural Research in Sweden from 1983-1989, director of the Arctic Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation from 1990-1996, and chair of the Department of Archaeology at Umeå University from 1996-2003. He is a member of the Explorers Club and has been awarded the Antarctic Service Medal. He has over 100 publications about archaeology and historic archaeology in the Arctic and Antarctica, North America, Northern Europe, Africa and China, as well as circumpolar health, research ethics and exploration.

Rip Bulkeley, Exeter College, Oxford. A former Smithsonian research fellow (at the National Air & Space Museum), Rip Bulkeley has been researching the IGY on several continents since the early 1990s. His work has also been funded by the Royal Society and the Leverhulme Foundation. Amongst the many archives he has visited are those of the International Council of Science, the Danish Meteorological Institute, the Royal Society, and the National Academies of Science in Washington, plus the national archives of Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. He is the author of The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy (Macmillan: 1991) and articles on the international relations of science and the history of the IGY.

Christopher Carter is an independent scholar studying geophysical sciences in the early modern period. A graduate of Duke University's history of science program, his dissertation investigated American and European imperial scientific research during the nineteenth century. His interests include terrestrial magnetism, meteorology, exploration and natural history, focusing on the social, political and religious interactions between science and society. Recent publications comprise papers on John Herschel's geomagnetic interests, magnetic instrumentation, and the neo-Platonic Family of Love. He is currently researching religious and scientific reactions to unusual phenomena and the methods used to incorporate them into systems of the natural world.

Erik M. Conway is the historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. He holds a Ph.D. in History of Science and Technology from the University of Minnesota. He has just completed a book manuscript on the history of atmospheric science in NASA, and has published two previous books: High Speed Dreams (2005) and Blind Landings (2007). He is a co-author of a new secondary-level education text, Science and Exploration (2007), and he is currently working on a history of robotic Mars exploration.

Philip N. Cronenwett is Special Collections Librarian emeritus at Dartmouth College where he curated the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration for more than two decades. He was also the last director of the Burndy Library on the History of Science and Technology in Cambridge, M.A. A historian by training, Cronenwett has written and lectured widely—including in Antarctica—on the history of polar exploration. He served as the chair of the international Polar Libraries Colloquy from 1998 to 2000. Cronenwett's current research is on the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-1876.

Michael Aaron Dennis received his doctorate in the history of science from The Johns Hopkins University in 1991. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and the UCSD Science Studies Program he spent ten years in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of "A change of state: political culture, technical practice and the origins of Cold War America" The Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming.

Steven J. Dick is the Chief Historian for NASA and Director of the NASA History Office. He obtained his B.S. in astrophysics (1971), and M.A. and Ph.D. (1977) in the history and philosophy of science from Indiana University. He worked as an astronomer and historian of science at the U. S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. for 24 years, before coming to NASA Headquarters in 2003. He has published books on the history of the extraterrestrial life debate, as well as a comprehensive history of the U. S. Naval Observatory. His latest work is an edited volume (with Roger Launius) on Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (2006). He is the recipient of the 2006 LeRoy E. Doggett Prize for Historical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society.

James R. Fleming is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College, Maine. He earned a B.S. in astronomy from Pennsylvania State University, an M.S. in atmospheric science from Colorado State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. His books include Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford, 1998), The Callendar Effect: the Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (AMS Books, 2007), and Intimate Universality (Science History/USA, 2006). His next book, "The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control," is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Stewart Gillmor has been at Wesleyan University since 1967, where he is Professor of History and Science. He has held visiting positions at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge; NASA; CNET-CNRS, Paris; Colorado School of Mines; Stanford; and the Smithsonian Institution. Third place in a National Boy Scout competition almost got him to Antarctica in 1957, although he worked during the IGY on Project Argus in the Azores. He was a U.S. exchange scientist in 1960-62 doing radiophysics with the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition, has returned twice to Antarctica and done research in Alaska, and Arctic Norway, and Sweden.

Greg Good teaches history of science at West Virginia University. He has published many articles on 19th and 20th geophysics and is writing a book titled "Magnetic Lives" on the careers of researchers in geomagnetism. This presentation was prepared under NSF grant 0432202.

Adrian Howkins is presently in the Graduate Program in History at the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation titled "Frozen Empires: A history of the Antarctic sovereignty dispute between Britain, Argentina and Chile, 1939-1959." From 1997-2001he was at University of St Andrews, Scotland, awarded M.A. (Hons) First Class in Modern History, May 2001. Awarded American Meteorological Society History of Science Fellowship, 2006-2007.

Rajesh Kochkar is currently professor of pharmaceutical heritage at the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab. An astrophysicist by training, Prof. Kochkar has published original research in a number of disciplines: theoretical astronomy; history of modern science and technology; civilizational history of astronomy; ancient Indian history; and globalization-era science policy. He is particularly interested in developing what he calls a cross-cultural civilizational perspective. He is a member of the organizing committee of International Astronomical Union Commission 41 on the history of astronomy and also of Commission 46 on the teaching of astronomy. He is a former director of India's National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies, New Delhi. He is Fulbright scholar and a Jawaharlal Nehru fellow.

Fae Korsmo came to the National Science Foundation in 1997 as the Program Director for Arctic Social Sciences. Prior to joining the Foundation, she was an associate professor of political science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Over the last 10 years at NSF, she has managed multidisciplinary grant programs in social sciences, science education, and academic research infrastructure. Her recent research has centered on post-World War II history of arctic science.

Lisbeth Lewander is senior lecturer, researcher, and prefekt (Head of Department)at the Institutionen för Genusvetenskap (Department of Gender Studies) in Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden. She has published on Swedish polar research expeditions and their leaders circa 1900 through 1950. Her special interests include polar politics and gender studies.

Cornelia Lüdecke obtained her diploma in meteorology at the University of Munich, and her Ph.D. on the history of German polar research at the Institute for the History of the Natural Sciences in 1994. In 2002 she passed her second thesis "Habilitation" at the Centre for History of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Technology at the University of Hamburg. In 2001 she was elected Vice President of the International Commission on History of Meteorology and 2006 she became President. In 2004 she founded the Action Group on History of Antarctic Research within the Scientific Committee of Antarctic Research. She has published more than 80 papers.

Craig McConnell is Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University Fullerton where he teaches a variety of courses in science studies and an American Studies course on Cold War Culture. He obtained his B.A. in History (University of Colorado, 1991), M.A. in History (North Carolina State University, 1991), and Ph.D. in History of Science (University of Wisconsin, 2000). He is currently working on a book about popular reaction, in America and around the globe, to the launch of Sputnik.

Allan A. Needell is Curator in the Space History Department of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. He is responsible for the museum's Apollo collection and has published on the history of physics, the origins of America's national laboratories, science and national security, and government/science relations. In 2000 he published an account of American science administrator Lloyd V. Berkner's role at the interface of the American national security and scientific communities up through the end of the Kennedy Administration. He is currently researching related issues extending through the 1980s.

Stephen J. Pyne is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, specializing in the history of ecology, the history of exploration, and the history of fire. He holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. degree is from the University of Texas at Austin. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988 and has been a Fulbright Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow twice. He spent fifteen seasons as a wildland firefighter at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park between 1967 and 1981. Since the publication of his second book, Fire in America in 1982, he has been known as one of the world's foremost experts on the environmental history of fire.

F. Sherwood Rowland is the Bren Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Irvine, which he joined as its founding chair in chemistry in 1964. His research work has centered on atmospheric chemistry, chemical kinetics and radioactive tracer research, with more than 400 scientific publications. He was President (1992) and Board Chair (1993) of AAAS, and Foreign Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences (1994-2002). He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (UK). He has received numerous other honors, including the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his "work on atmospheric ozone."

Marc Rothenberg is agency historian for the National Science Foundation. Prior to coming to the Foundation in December 2006, he spent thirty-one years on the staff of the Joseph Henry Papers Project at the Smithsonian Institution. In addition to co-editing volumes 3-11 of The Papers of Joseph Henry, Rothenberg edited The History of Science in the United States: An Encyclopedia (2001). He also has published in such journals as Historical Records of Australian Science, The Astronomical Journal, Pacific Science, Osiris, The Journal for the History of Astronomy, and Social Studies of Science.

William (Billy) Stevenson III is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Japanese history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Currently at Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan), he is researching and writing a dissertation on Japanese explorers and adventurers from the Meiji Era to the Pacific War. Central to the study is the Japanese Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912.

Roger D. Turner is a Ph.D. candidate in the history and sociology of science, University of Pennsylvania. His major fields include history of science, history of technology, and history of computing and communications. A.M. History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2005; A.B. History of Science magna cum laude, Brown University, 2001. Recent publications include: "Teaching the Weather Cadet Generation: Aviation, Pedagogy, and Aspirations to a Universal Meteorology in America, 1920-1950," in Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Meteorology, edited by James R. Fleming, et al., (Sagamore Beach, M.A.: Science History Publications, October 2006): 141-173.

Zuoyue Wang is Associate Professor, Department of History, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA. He holds a Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, 1994, an M.S. in history of physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 1985, and a B.S. in physics, Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, China, 1982. He has been visiting lecturer in history of science, UC Berkeley History Department, 1999, and at UC Santa Barbara History Department, 1994-98, and instructor in history of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences Graduate School, Beijing, 1985-1986. His scholarly interests are in the history of science, technology, and politics in Cold War America; US presidential science advising; Asian Americans in science and technology; modern science and politics in China; and modern physics. He has a book in press: In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).

Jiuchen Zhang is Associate Professor, Institute for the History of Natural Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the Division of History of Geo-Science, Chinese Commission of History of Science and Technology, with research interests in Chinese geo-science in 20th century, the history of international scientific exchange and Chinese contemporary history of natural resources surveying. Trained at The Capital Teachers College; graduate student at the Institute for the History of Natural Science, CAS.

Speaker Biographies | Presentation Abstracts | Registration Form

Home/Agenda