Sara J. Schechner

Sara J. Schechner, PhD is the David P. Wheatland Curator Emerita of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University, retiring in 2024 after a quarter century of service.   She remains active in international societies related to historic preservation and history of science.

Schechner earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge in physics and the history and philosophy of science. Before returning to Harvard’s History of Science Department, Schechner was chief curator at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and curated exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society.

She is the author of Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (1997), Time and Time Again: How Science and Culture Shape the Past, Present, and Future (2014), and Time of Our Lives: Sundials of the Adler Planetarium (2019); co-author of Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (2015); and co-editor of How Scientific Instruments Have Changed Hands (2016), Failed Historical Scientific Instruments (2024), and Forty Years of Scientific Instrument Studies (2025). Her next book will be Creating an Ordered World in Disordered Times: The Pope Orrery.  It analyzes a grand orrery (a mechanical model of the solar system) made in Boston during the American Revolution and what it reveals about life and work in those times. Other projects concern scientific instruments of glass in America, and the iconography of women and astronomical instruments in works of art. 

Schechner is currently the President of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Commission C3 (History of Astronomy), and past president of the Inter-Union Commission for History of Astronomy of the IAU and the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST).  She is also past chair of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), a founding member of its Working Group for the Preservation of Astronomical Heritage, and on the editorial board of the Journal for the History of Astronomy.  Schechner was the Secretary of the IUHPST Scientific Instrument Commission, and is today on the editorial board of Scientific Instruments and Collections (its Brill series).  She has also served on advisory boards for the Center for History of Science of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, and other organizations. 

Throughout her career, Schechner has been deeply engaged in museum education through curated exhibitions and object-based teaching in diverse Harvard courses and programs. She used to re-enact electrical experiments performed at 18th-century Harvard and added a Frankenstein electrical show in 2018 in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's book. She also ran innovative hands-on workshops and devised activity kits that put replica historical scientific instruments into the hands of students in order to teach them cultural history and early science.  Other projects have included interactive sundials for outdoor learning centers.  For the 2004 Transit of Venus, Schechner organized a sunrise festival at Harvard that included observations not only with modern instruments but also with the same telescope used by Professor John Winthrop in 1769, and the Harvard Band performing John Philip Sousa’s Transit of Venus March.  In 2013, she was a principal organizer of the Summer Solstice Festival of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.

Schechner's research, teaching, and exhibition work  has earned her many prestigious international awards and lectureships.  In 2021, she delivered the James Arthur Lecture of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors--the first woman to do so since the lectureship's inception 90 years earlier.  In 2021, the North American Sundial Society awarded her the Sawyer Dialing Prize--the "Oscar" of the sundial world because the recipient receives a customized window-sill sundial--in recognition of her career in education and conservation of our dialing heritage and in particular her authorship of Time of Our Lives: Sundials of the Adler Planetarium. In 2020, the American Astronomical Society named her a Legacy Fellow.  She is the 2019 recipient of the Paul Bunge Prize from the German Chemical Society and the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry; this is regarded worldwide as the most important honor in the history of scientific instruments. In 2018, the American Astronomical Society presented her with the LeRoy E. Doggett Prize for Historical Astronomy. Awarded biennially to an individual who has significantly influenced the field of history of astronomy through a career-long effort, it is the most prestigious prize internationally in the discipline.  Schechner was the first woman to receive this award. In addition, Schechner's innovative teaching in and outside of museums and academia was recognized by the prestigious Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize of the History of Science Society in 2008.  Her exhibition, Time, Life, & Matter: Science in Cambridge, on permanent display in the Putnam Gallery of Harvard’s Science Center, took First Place in the 2007 International Design Awards competition, and Body of Knowledge: A History of Anatomy (in 3 Parts) received the Great Exhibitions Award of the British Society for the History of Science in 2014.

In her spare time, Schechner is an award-winning quilt artist and enjoys Scottish country dancing. She lives in a historic house in West Newton, Massachusetts, which is on the National Register and has an archaeological site in her back yard.