The Amateur Scientist - Shawn Carlson

Shawn Carlson

In 1995 Scientific American discovered the Society for Amateur Scientists. Its founder and Executive Director, Shawn Carlson, Ph. D, was a physicist and established science writer who had left academe a year earlier to devote his career to helping amateur scientists. Dr. Carlson took over the column in November of that year and immediately returned its focus to cutting-edge science projects that amateurs can do inexpensively at home. Over 1 million Scientific American readers turned to "The Amateur Scientist" every month. In 1999, Carlson became the first person to ever win a MacArthur Fellowship for science education. (A distinction that he still holds in 2008.) Carlson won the award in part for the innovative projects he developed and published in "The Amateur Scientist".

In 2001, Scientific American came under new management. As part of a "face lift" of the magazine, all of the long-running columns were retired, including "The Amateur Scientist". March 2001 was the last time the column ran in Scientific American. Archive versions of the column remained available to Scientific American paid subscribers via their website.

Carlson, along with co-editor Sheldon Greaves, Ph.D., also created The Amateur Scientist--The Complete Collection, a CD-ROM containing all the articles in a fully text-searchable HTML format.