Lorraine Daston, Ph.D. was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1973) and Cambridge (Dipl. 1974) Universities and received a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard (1979). She has taught at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Chicago and held visiting positions at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Vienna, and Oxford University (Isaiah Berlin Lectures in the History of Ideas).
Since 1995 she has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt University, both in Berlin. At the Max Planck Institute, she has organized research projects on the history of demonstration and proof, the varieties of scientific experience, the moral authority of nature, and the common languages of art and science. She has published widely in the history of statistics and probability theory, early modern natural knowledge, scientific objectivity, and cognitive passions. Her books include Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and (with Katharine Park), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (1998), both of which of which were awarded the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society, as well as Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit (2000), Wunder, Beweis, Tatsache: Zur einer Geschichte der Rationalität (2001), Objectivity (2007, with Peter Galison).
She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Corresponding Member of the British Academy, and Member of both the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina Academy of Sciences. In 2010 she was awarded the Orden Pour le Mérite of the Federal Republic of Germany.