Roger Turner
Curator of Instruments and Artifacts
Roger Turner is an historian and storyteller. His particular scholarly expertise is in 20th-century atmospheric science, scientific instruments, and environmental monitoring.
At the Science History Institute, Roger helped launch the student role-playing game Conflicts in Chemistry: The Case of Rare Earth Elements, worked on the film The Instrumental Chemist, developed the playful online experience Instruments of Change, and contributes to museum exhibitions. He wrote and curated Mechanochemistry: The Science of Crush for Google Arts & Culture and also authors the occasional Distillations magazine story.
Before coming to the Institute, Roger taught at colleges and worked as a public history consultant, advising on oral history preservation, collections development, and public communications. His research on weather forecasting has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Meteorological Society, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. You can read the bits with neat pictures at PicturingMeteorology.com.
Stories from Roger Turner
Is the Plastic Bag History?
Our latest outdoor exhibition explores the history of a familiar object from a surprising number of angles.
Collecting the Ecosystems of Science
A dispatch from PITTCON by our curator of instruments and artifacts.
What’s Behind a Nobel Prize?
In this course Roger Turner will show how the Nobel Prize can be an entry point for more inclusive stories about the people who work in science.
Critical Metals: The Chemistry of Light
From lightbulbs to lasers, many technologies use the luminescent properties of rare earth metals.
‘High’ School Science
Most object labels tell us what something is. Why one in our collections tells us what something is not.
The Price of Gold in a ‘Golden Age’
Two humorous poems illuminate the politics of science funding in the 1950s.