Doron Swade is an engineer, historian, and museum professional. He is the leading authority on the life and work of Charles Babbage, a 19th-century English mathematician and computer pioneer. He masterminded the construction of the first Babbage Calculating Engine built to original 19th-century designs.
He was Assistant Director and Head of Collections at the Science Museum in London and before that Senior Curator of Computing for fourteen years. He directed and managed the national computing and electronics collections. He researched, lectured, published, and publicized his field through broadcast and scholarly media. In 1989, he founded the Computer Conservation Society. The practices he pioneered led to several of the major reconstructions in the modern era.
Swade has studied physics, electronics engineering, philosophy of science, machine intelligence, and history. He has a BSc Hons. in physics and electronics engineering, an MSc in control engineering, and a PhD in history of computing (UCL).
Swade has curated many exhibitions. He has authored three books and over 70 scholarly and popular articles on curatorship, museology, and history of modern computing, including cover-feature articles in Scientific American and New Scientist.
Concurrently with his work at the Computer History Museum, Swade is visiting professor (history of computing) at Portsmouth University, and an honorary research fellow (computer science) at Royal Holloway University of London. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of several scholarly societies.
