The Cambridge Science Festival, which has run almost continuously since 2007 and spawned similar festivals around the world, won’t run in the fall. It is taking a pause this year and will run only the one-day carnival portion of the festival.
The decision was made before the turmoil of the past few months, said Keelin Caldwell, interim deputy director of The MIT Museum, referring to the federal government under president Donald Trump defunding and dismantling much of the country’s science infrastructure. “Certainly it would have been harder to pull it off” after Inauguration Day, she said.
The museum’s new director as of July 2024, Michael John Gorman, “really wanted to take a closer look” at the event it organizes and runs, Caldwell said, and the museum is consulting with stakeholders and doing strategic planning. The festival typically lasts about a week, with hundreds of events often planned and operated with partners concurrently – and organizers needed time to pause and reflect. Its previous pause was during the Covid pandemic, when crowding people together risked spreading illness.
“We also didn’t want to lose the momentum of the carnival,” Caldwell said. “Many people, when they think of the Cambridge festival, are thinking of the carnival day.”
Usually the last day of the festival, the family-friendly carnival sees public and private organizations set up booths showcasing science and technology outside the museum in Kendall Square. The event attracted 17,000 people in 2023 in just its few hours, according to The MIT Museum.
The carnival has received 147 applications for booths this year and is working to add more spots to the layout, Caldwell said. Booths include an underwater robotics challenge from MIT Sea Grant; learning to sort trash with the City of Cambridge Recycling Department; and connecting math and science through measurements with the Cambridge Public Schools Science Department. There will also be performances including the “Tumble” science podcast on space science and demonstrations from the MIT Physics Department.
Most of the festival’s funding is spent on the carnival, Caldwell said, though she declined to give details on costs and noted that the festival is just one of the many ways The MIT Museum invests in the city and its residents. Festival costs fall under the 30 percent of expenses spent on programs, according to the museum’s FY24 annual report, when the museum’s total operating revenues were $11 million. (A New York Times article reported that the festival cost $400,000 in 2011.) The festival – and carnival – has retained its main sponsors this year, and most corporate sponsors.
The museum had already been thinking about the evolution of the festival to make it more appealing to adults – such as examining whether calling it a festival gives off a school science fair vibe, particularly as it was held in April during school vacation until 2022. “Sometimes I think adults think science is for kids or for professional scientists,” Caldwell said. “Innovation, curiosity, problem solving, that’s a skill that every adult uses and can grow.”
Planners want to promote the relationship between the museum and festival. A survey conducted during last year’s carnival showed low awareness that the museum produced the carnival – and that the carnival was part of a longer festival. “And that’s a huge project for the museum,” Caldwell said.
“The Cambridge Science Festival represents an opportunity for inquisitive visitors of all ages to celebrate our diverse, creative community and experience our rich innovation,” said Jeremy Warnick, spokesperson for the City of Cambridge, which has sponsored the festival since its inception, hosts exhibits and activities during it and provides funding, including $75,000 in grant funding for the event in the 2026 fiscal year. “It has become one of Cambridge’s signature events.”
The Cambridge Science Carnival is noon to 4 p.m. Sept. 21 in the Kendall/MIT Open Space at 292 Main St., Kendall Square, and is free, including admission to the MIT museum.
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As one of the hundreds of volunteers who participated in the former April Science Festival, I am appalled that this wonderful event has been discontinued. We volunteers and parents witnessed the joy as kids slapped on to their lab coats their “I aspire to be a “_______” badges they filled in with “ornithologist”, “robotics engineer”, “astronomer”, “astronaut”, etc.. These eager kids traveled all around Cambridge that week, and even in other parts of the state, to attend a huge variety of events, at museums, outdoors in nature, at tech companies, and in classrooms. Many included music, art and theater and appealed to all ages. Some years “markers were set up along Mass Ave to visualize the distances between planets or lengths of chromosomes. Space does not permit me to respond to the comment above “calling it a festival gives off a school science fair vibe.” But, I do wonder: Have we, in this city of education, now become a haven for those who denigrate Science ?