Svante Lindqvist (b. 1948) is Marshal of the Realm (riksmarskalk) to the Swedish Royal Court, having assumed the position on January 1, 2010. Prior to that, he was founding Director of the Nobel Museum, 1998–2009. Previously he held a chair as Professor of History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, where he established and became Chairman of its Department for History of Science and Technology in 1989. He has a M.Sc.Eng. (Physics) from the Royal Institute of Technology (1977) and a Ph.D. in History of Science and Ideas from Uppsala University (1984). He was a Visiting Scholar in the Office for History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, during the academic year 1986–1987, and a Visiting Professor in the Department for History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania during the fall semester of 1992. During the academic year 1995–96, he was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. In the fall of 2003, he was a Visiting Professor in the STS Program at MIT.

Since opening to the public in 2001, the Nobel Museum in Stockholm has developed into a research-oriented institution with a constantly growing attendance, transitory exhibitions, an active school program, public lectures, research seminars, etc. The Nobel Museum is also engaged in producing and sending large traveling exhibitions abroad. Its first traveling exhibition “Cultures of Creativity” visited 14 venues during the period 2001–2007: Oslo, Tokyo, Seoul, Houston, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Florence, San Francisco, New York, London, Bangalore, Singapore, Sydney, and Abu Dhabi. The Nobel Museum’s new traveling exhibition “Alfred Nobel: Networks of Innovation” opened in Dubai in the spring of 2008, and was shown in Paris during the fall of 2008. In the spring of 2009, it was shown in St. Petersburg.

His dissertation, Technology on Trial: The Introduction of Steam Power Technology into Sweden, 1715–1736, Uppsala Studies in History of Science, 1 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984), was awarded three national prizes, including the Letterstedt Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1985. Among his other other publications is a volume edited in 1993, Center on the Periphery: Historical Aspects of 20th-Century Swedish Physics (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1993) and another one in 2000, Museums of Modern Science, Nobel Symposium 112. In 2008, he was a co-editor of Research and Museums: Proceedings of An International Symposium in Stockholm 22–25 May 2007, as well as of Aurora Torealis: Studies in the History of Science and Ideas in Honor of Tore Frängsmyr.

He has been a member of the Kuratorium (1992-2008) and the Wissenschaftlichen Beirats (1998-2008) of the Deutsches Museum, München. During the period 1991—1999, he was on the Advisory Committee for the history project at the European Space Agency (ESA), Paris, and in 1996-2004 a member of the Corporation Visiting Committee for the Humanities at MIT, Cambridge, Mass. In 2008–2009, he was a member of the International Advisory Board of the Medical Museion in Copenhagen.

He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (1992), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1994) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (2002). Svante Lindqvist was recently elected President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His three-year term of office began on July 1, 2009.