Edward Tenner

Edward Tenner is an independent writer and speaker at the intersection of science, design, and culture. A founding advisor of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, he is now affiliated with the National Museum of American History as Distinguished Scholar and is also a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University Department of History. He was previously a community college instructor, a health care studies researcher, executive editor for science and history at Princeton University Press, a visiting lecturer at Princeton, a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Pennsylvania. He received the A.B. from Princeton University and the Ph.D. in European history from the University of Chicago and was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. His most recent books are Why Things Bite Back, Our Own Devices, and The Efficiency Paradox (all Knopf/Vintage). He has delivered two TED talks based on themes of these works. His next publication, “Adam Smith and the Roomba®,” on technology and life satisfaction in the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, is in press with Raritan Quarterly Review.