Lorraine Daston is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has taught at 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, Oxford University, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago and is a member of major scientific academies and associations.

Among several prestigious awards she has recently been awarded the Gerda Henkel Prize 2020 with the jury quote: "At a time when the value and credibility of scientific knowledge are relativized in an unexpected way or even fundamentally questioned, the historical research of the award winner is of the utmost importance and topicality.”

Lorraine Daston has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity.