Trevor Owens

bio

Photo by Elaina Finkelstein/Library of Congress.


Dr. Trevor Owens is a social scientist, historian, archivist, and research executive working to understand and strengthen the institutions through which knowledge is produced, preserved, and put to use. Across scientific societies, federal agencies, and cultural heritage institutions, he has set research agendas, shaped national strategies for digital infrastructure, and led interdisciplinary research and preservation programs. He brings historical perspective and social science research into organizational strategy, helping communities understand their past, respond to present challenges, and shape their futures.

Owens currently serves as the first Chief Research Officer of the American Institute of Physics. In this role, he has built and leads an integrated research organization spanning social science research, public policy analysis, and the history and culture of the physical sciences, including oversight of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives. He leads AIP’s overall research strategy and annual research agenda, developing the people, partnerships, infrastructure, and funding needed to produce timely research on the forces shaping the physical sciences. Under his leadership, AIP’s research team has expanded its capacity for rapid-response analysis, public policy research, historical scholarship, and research on the scientific workforce and disciplinary cultures, producing evidence that informs scientific societies, higher education leaders, policymakers, and the broader research community.

Owens also leads fundraising strategy for AIP’s research and history programs and has secured more than $1.5 million in external funding from federal agencies and private foundations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation. These investments support new research, partnerships, and programs designed to strengthen the scientific enterprise and preserve and interpret its history.

He is also a Public Historian in Residence at American University and a faculty member for California’s Rare Book School. He serves in national and international advisory roles with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Library and Archives Canada, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the United States Copyright Office.

Across his career, Owens has moved from developing and studying digital tools and communities to shaping national programs and building the institutional infrastructures that sustain knowledge into the future. Previously, as Director of Digital Services at the Library of Congress, he led more than 100 staff and oversaw a portfolio exceeding $20 million annually. He directed digitization, metadata and discovery, digital preservation, web archiving, and a major crowdsourcing program, helping build the infrastructure through which one of the world’s largest cultural heritage institutions manages and provides access to digital collections at scale.

Before joining the Library of Congress, Owens held senior leadership roles at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), where he led the National Digital Platform initiative. Under his leadership, IMLS invested more than $30 million in over 100 projects advancing digital infrastructure for libraries and cultural heritage institutions nationwide. He helped shape national strategy for digital library development and coordinated efforts across federal agencies, foundations, and professional communities. Owens began his career at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, where he led outreach and community engagement for Zotero, the open-source research platform.

Owens is the author and coauthor of books on digital preservation, cultural memory, history, and institutional change. His most recent, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory (University of Michigan Press, 2024), examines how cultural institutions can respond to technological and societal change through approaches centered on maintenance, care, and repair. The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) received major awards from the American Library Association and Society of American Archivists and has become a foundational text in the field. His research and writing have appeared in venues including Science Communication, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Physics Today, New Directions in Folklore, American Libraries, Harvard Educational Review, Archival Science, and Curator: The Museum Journal.

His work has been recognized through honors including the University of Wisconsin–Madison Luminary Award (2025), the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology (2021), designation as a Library Journal “Mover & Shaker” (2018), and the Society of American Archivists’ Archival Innovator Award. In 2022, he served as a Fulbright Specialist with the National Library of Kosovo, supporting the development of its first national digital collections strategy.

Across his research, writing, and institutional leadership, Owens is interested in how knowledge institutions can become more resilient, responsive, and consequential in a period of rapid technological and social change. His current work increasingly focuses on the research enterprise itself: how scientific communities develop and sustain talent, how disciplinary cultures and institutions evolve, how the historical record of science can inform its future, and how research and evidence can help scientific organizations and policymakers make better decisions about the future of science.

Contacting Me: 

The best way to get a hold of me is email (trevor dot john owens at gmail dot com).  I am up for commenting on any of the areas that I work in a personal capacity. If you are a journalist on tight deadlines it will likely work best if you can email me a specific set of questions instead of trying to set up a time to talk on the phone.

Interviews and Press: 

Mentions/Quoted in the Press & Media

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