Michael John Gorman is the Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the MIT Museum, and Professor of the Practice of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Gorman was previously the Founding Director of BIOTOPIA Naturkundemuseum Bayern (www.biotopia.net), a new museum of life sciences and the environment in development in Munich, and a University Professor (Chair) in Life Sciences in Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, where he also held a courtesy professorship at the Faculty of Literature and Linguistics. Previously Michael John was Founding Director of Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin, dedicated to igniting creativity and discovery where science and art collide. In 2012, he founded Science Gallery International (www.sciencegallery.org) to bring Science Gallery experiences to a global audience, with Science Gallery locations now open or in development in London, Melbourne, Bangalore, Atlanta, Monterey, Rotterdam and Berlin. Before founding Science Gallery, Michael John was Lecturer in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University, Stanford University and MIT.
He has written numerous books on topics ranging from Buckminster Fuller’s architecture to seventeenth-century science and articles and reviews in journals including Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, and Leonardo. His recent books include The Scientific Counter-Revolution: The Jesuits and the Invention of Modern Science (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and Idea Colliders: The Future of Science Museums (MIT Press, 2020). He sits on several boards, including the Rachel Carson Center, Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, and the Executive Board of the Munich Science Communication Lab, and is an Expert Adviser to the European Commission (JRC).