Prof. Oren Harman studied biology and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford, and Harvard. He is an historian and writer, and teaches at the STS Graduate Program an Bar Ilan University. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Harman is a senior research fellow, and hosts the lecture series Talking about Science in the 21st Century.

Harman's books include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome; the trilogy Rebels, Outsiders, Dreamers in biology; Evolutions: Fifteen Myths that Explain Our World; and The Price of Altruism, which was selected as a New York Times Book of the Year and has been the basis of two plays. Harman is currently working on a cultural and scientific history of metamorphosis, and on a children's book about Charles Darwin's missing notebooks. His books have been translated into Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Malayalam. His fields of specialization are the theory of evolution, the history and philosophy of biology, scientific biography, and science and mythology.

Prof. Harman sings bass in the Tel Aviv Chamber Choir.