Steve Turner

Steve Turner is professor of history at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where he teaches the history of science and technology, as well as contemporary science, technology, and society (STS) studies. He is currently co-director of the CRYSTAL Atlantique project, chairs the CRYSTAL Advisory Committee, and is principal researcher on the CRYSTAL research theme on the public understanding of science.

Steve holds a doctorate from Princeton University. His research and publications have dealt with the history of the German universities, the historical emergence of the research ethic within that university system during the nineteenth century, the career of German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, and the history of various scientific controversies over the physiology and psychology of vision. Recently his research has turned to more nearly contemporary science-and-society issues, especially those involving agricultural biotechnology Canada, including its social reception and government regulatory issues. He has published on the Canadian regulatory reception of recombinant bovine somatotropin, on potato science and variety development in Canada, and on the attempts of scientists to understand the late blight disease of potatoes. Along the way, Steve and Karen Sullinger (Director of CRYSTAL Atlantique) have published several joint articles on science-teaching and nature-of-science issues as they affect science teaching and learning. Steve is the author of In the Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy (1994), and he is a former recipient of the Allan P. Stuart Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at UNB. He is also a past-president of the Fredericton Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) and of the New Brunswick SPCA.

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