Tim Boon works on the material and public culture of science and technology, which is a fancy way of saying he’s interested in how media communicate science and technology, and how objects mediate scientific and material culture, including how that’s experienced in everyday life. Trained as a historian of science, he is known for interdisciplinary work linking history of science, technology and medicine to media studies and museum studies. Keenly interested in music for more than half a century (he built a modular synth in the 1980s), he developed a research-driven music programme of funded research network meetings, concerts, exhibitions and publications in his period as Head of Research at the Science Museum, the last third of his career there, where he worked as a curator and manager until 2025. Other major themes of his tenure in that role included a programme, entitled ‘PHoSTEM: The public History of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine’, launched via an international workshop in 2010, and sustained via an AHRC research network. He also led, in the context of the Artefacts Consortium for research in science museums, an initiative studying tacit skills and histories of use of museum objects. As a curator, he contributed to exhibitions and galleries, including ‘Health Matters’ (1994), ‘Making the Modern World’ (2000) and ‘Oramics to Electronica’ (2013). 

He has also written extensively on science documentary; his first book was Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television (2008), followed by many papers on aspects of science on film and television, including a 50^th anniversary paper on the origins of the BBC’s Horizon series. 

Amongst his funded research projects, he was Principal Investigator of the three-year, £3M ‘Congruence Engine’ research project under the AHRC’s ‘Towards a National Collection’ funding stream, which experimented with digital linkage of museum collections with the aim of making them accessible to users of all kinds. 

He brings all these interests to the Augmented instruments Lab, just as he, simultaneously, is deploying them in his other part-time role in the science and technology studies department at UCL. At AIL he expects to promote interdisciplinary conversations between design engineering, history, museums and STS. He plans to (co-)write on the comparative cultures of musical instrument innovation and museum approaches to materiality, and on the historical musical associations of instrument development.

Tim is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science, a former member of the AHRC’s Advisory Board, and sometime co-chair of IROC, the Independent Research Organisation Consortium. 

PhD: Films and the Contestation of Public Health in Interwar Britain (University of London, External, 1999)

MSc: History and Philosophy of Science (UCL, 1986)

BA: History and History of Science (University of Leeds, 1982)