Prof. Oren Harman

Senior Research Fellow

Prof. Oren Harman studied biology and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford and Harvard. He teaches at the Science Technology and Society Graduate Program an Bar Ilan University, and is a senior visiting fellow at the max planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Harman's books include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome; the trilogy RebelsOutsidersDreamers in biology; Evolutions: Fifteen Myths that Explain Our World; and The Price of Altruism, which was nominated for a Pulitzer prize, and adapted into two award-winning plays. Harman is currently working on a cultural and scientific history of metamorphosis, and recently published a children's book about Charles Darwin's missing notebooks.  His books have been translated into Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Malayalam. His fields of specialization are the theory of evolution, the history and philosophy of biology, scientific biography, and science and mythology.

At the Van Leer, Harman has hosted the lecture series Talking about Science in the 21st Century, and established the Science and Creativity group. He is currently engaged in creating the Van Leer Science Hub which aims to produce original, high-quality cultural products, from plays to books to museum exhibitions to TV series for K-12 children across Israeli society.   

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