Tom Callen earned his Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education – Earth Science, with a concentration in Planetarium Education, in 1976. He went on to receive his Master of Arts in Teaching, specializing in Planetarium Education, in 1978.
Over the course of a 40-year career, Callen has worked at five planetariums, four of them major institutions. He spent nearly 13 years at the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, where he served as Acting Chief for two years. It was during his tenure at NASM that Callen first met John Lienhard of the University of Houston, through their shared interest in the museum’s World War I Fokker D.VII fighter aircraft.
In 1991, Callen relocated to Stockholm, Sweden, to join the Swedish Museum of Natural History (NRM) as Astronomer and Program Producer. There, he helped build, commission, and open Cosmonova—Sweden’s largest, and most advanced Omnimax/digital planetarium theater. He was elected a Fellow of the International Planetarium Society in 1996. Throughout his career under star-filled domes, Callen has delivered hundreds of live lectures for public and school audiences, written dozens of educational show scripts, and authored and illustrated Cosmonova’s monthly bilingual online column on the night sky, which ran for a decade.
Following nearly 20 years at NRM followed by five years with a Swedish science education company, Callen retired in 2019. He now writes full time, publishing both fiction and nonfiction through Amazon, contributing a quarterly column to the International Planetarium Society’s journal, and authoring a weekly space and astronomy news column for the European Space Education Resource Office (ESERO) Sweden website.
A lifelong enthusiast of astronomy, human spaceflight, planetary science, aviation history, and music, Callen is also an accomplished amateur drummer and a serious scholar of the American Civil War—particularly the Gettysburg Campaign, a subject he has studied for more than 25 years. He and his wife, Mariana, a Curator at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, live on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago with their trilingual cat, Mynta.
To contact Tom Callen, send email to tcallen08 [at] gmail.com (tcallen08[at]gmail[dot]com) .