Alistair Sponsel is Senior Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology & Society  at Harvard and Historian of the Life Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. His current research topics include the emergence of Cambridge, UK as a center for biotechnology research, the history of marine science, and the history of Pacific islands and islanders. 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.