Alistair Sponsel

Alistair Sponsel

Alumni
Managing director (2020-2021)


Alistair Sponsel is Historian of the Life Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a lecturer in history at Tufts University. He was managing director of the Observatory from its inception in 2020 until September 2021.

His research interests include the history of marine science, the history of Pacific islands and islanders, and the emergence of Cambridge, UK as a center for biotechnology research. He is the author of Darwin’s Evolving Identity (Chicago, 2018) and an associate editor of two volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin.

Sponsel received his Ph.D. in history of science from Princeton University and he was a member of the history faculty at Vanderbilt University from 2012 to 2018. He has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.For contact information and more, click here.