Bios
Jay Aronson
is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching focus is on the interactions of science, technology, law, and human rights in a variety of contexts. He is currently engaged in a long-term study of the ethical, political, and social dimensions of post-conflict and post-disaster DNA identification of the missing and disappeared. This work is funded by NIH. Jay is also part of a project that seeks to improve the quality of civilian casualty recording and estimation in times of conflict. He is the founder and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon. Jay’s previous research focused on the development and use of forensic DNA identification in the American criminal justice system. He received his Ph.D. in History of Science and Technology from the University of Minnesota and was both a pre- and post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Daniel Barben
is VDI Professor of Futures Studies at the Institute of Political Science at RWTH Aachen University (VDI = The Association of German Engineers). He earned his doctorate at the University of Potsdam (political science, 1995) and his habilitation at the Free University of Berlin (sociology, 2004). He has more than twenty years of research experience in STS, both in Europe and the United States. His main research interests concern the assessment and governance of emerging technologies (e.g., biotechnology, nanotechnology, biometrics, geoengineering); the future-oriented transformation and resilience of infrastructures (e.g., building and urban development, energy, mobility); the configuration of technological regimes as regards innovation, risk regulation, intellectual property rights, ethics, and acceptance politics; reflexive and anticipatory knowledge/governance; globalization and democracy; and sustainability. He is the author of the books Politische Ökonomie der Biotechnologie (Campus, 2007) and Theorietechnik und Politik bei Niklas Luhmann (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996) and co-editor of Biotechnologie – Globalisierung – Demokratie (with Gabriele Abels, Edition Sigma, 2000).
John Beatty
teaches history and philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His research focuses on the theoretical foundations, methodology, and socio-political dimensions of genetics and evolutionary biology . His current research projects concern 1) the distinction between “history” and “science,” and the respects in which evolutionary biology is as much like former as it is like the latter, 2) the relationships between biology and “the state,” from the Manhattan Project to the Human Genome Project, and 3) the theological dimensions of the Darwinian revolution. He is a coauthor of The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press). He co-directs the annual MBL Seminar in the History of Biology. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and recently chaired the AAAS Section on History and Philosophy of Science.
John Dryzek
is Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Professor of Political Science in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, former Head of the Departments of Political Science at the Universities of Oregon and Melbourne and the Social and Political Theory program at ANU, and former editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science. Recent books include Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance (Oxford University Press, 2010), and the co-edited Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford University Press, 2011 forthcoming).
Steven Epstein
is Professor of Sociology and John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, where he also directs the Science in Human Culture Program and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Cluster in Science Studies. Among his other campus affiliations, Epstein is a co-convener of The Sexualities Project at Northwestern. Epstein studies the contested production of knowledge, especially biomedical knowledge, with an emphasis on the interplay of social movements, experts, and health institutions, and with a focus on the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. His books Impure Science: AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge and Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research have received multiple awards, including the Robert K. Merton Prize and the Ludwik Fleck Prize. Most recently, he is a co-editor of Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions. He serves on the editorial boards of Social Studies of Science, Public Understanding of Science, and other journals.
Ulrike Felt
is professor of social studies of science at the University of Vienna, a post she has held since 1999, and head of the Vienna STS department. After finishing her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Vienna in 1983, she worked for nearly five years in an interdisciplinary research team of science historians at the European Center for High Energy Physics (CERN). After her stay at CERN she returned to Vienna, where she took up a position at the newly founded Institute for Philosophy of Science and Social Studies of Science headed by Helga Nowotny. In 1997 she received her habilitation in Science Studies/Sociology of Sciences. From July 2002 to June 2007 she was editor of the international peer-reviewed Journal Science, Technology, & Human Values. Most recently she has also engaged in setting up an interdisciplinary Masterprogramme Science – Technology – Society (taught in English) at the University of Vienna. She has served as policy advisor to both the Austrian government and the European Union.
Yuko Fujigaki
is Professor at Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, JAPAN. She was a program chair of 4S 2010 Tokyo Meeting, jointly held with JSSTS (Japanese Society for Studies of Science and Technology). She edited a book on “Case Analysis and Theoretical Concepts for Science and Technology Studies”(Univ. of Tokyo Press, 2005). This book is now widely used in the teaching STS in Japanese universities, since Japanese cases are efficacious for stirring up students’ interests. This book also opens the door to questions on universalities vs. cultural differences in STS concepts. She also writes a book on “The Public Ethic and Spirit of Specialism” and edited a book on “Theoretical Perspective for Science Communication”(Univ. of Tokyo Press, 2008). She was a Vice Director in Research, National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, Science and Technology Agency, 1996-2000 and has served as policy adviser at Several Ministries in Japan
Joan Fujimura
isis Professor of Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has written on the sociology of genetics, molecular biology, biotechnology, biomedicine, bioinformatics, epigenetics and systems biology. Recent publications include “Different differences: The use of ancestry versus race in biomedical human genetic research” Social Studies of Science 41(1): 5-30, Feb. 2011 (with R. Rajagopalan) which discusses the use (or not) of race in biomedical genetics and the making of differences in genetics without using categories of race. She has also written and is writing on interdisciplinarity and collaboration in systems biology and epigenetics research. Her most recent article in this genre is “Calculating life?,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. Biomed. Sci., 2011 (joint with J. Calvert) and “Interrogating Innovation,” in progress (with R. Rajagopalan). Fujimura is currently a scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation where she is writing a book on the sociology of race and genetics and its impact on race theory in the social sciences.
Jeremy Greene
is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science of Harvard University, Instructor in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics of Harvard Medical School, and Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine of Brigham & Women’s Hospital. His research interests focus on the history of the pharmaceutical industry and its interactions with medical research, clinical practice, and public health, and his first book, Prescribing By Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (2007, Johns Hopkins University Press) traces the development of chronic disease categories as markets for risk-reducing pharmaceuticals. He is the faculty coordinator for the Harvard Interfaculty Initiative on Medications and Society. In addition to teaching, he maintains a clinical practice at the Brigham Internal Medicine Associates and attends on the general medicine service wards of the Brigham & Women’s Hospital.
Sherine Hamdy
is a medical anthropologist and the Kutayba Alghanim Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University. Her interests in STS are at the intersections with contemporary Islamic thought and she currently works on issues related to environmental health, biotechnologies, reproduction, and organ transplantation. Her 2008 article “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail: Political Etiologies in an Egyptian dialysis unit” won the Rudolph Virchow award from the Society of Medical Anthropology. Her book: Our Bodies Belong to God: Islam, Organ Transplants, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt will be published in the Fall 2011 with the University of California Press.
Stefan Helmreich
is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has also served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. He holds an Anthropology PhD from Stanford University, and has worked as a Postdoctoral Associate in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University as well as an Assistant Professor of Science and Society at New York University. Helmreich examines the work of contemporary biologists puzzling through the conceptual boundaries of “life.” Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California, 1998) in 2001 won the Diana Forsythe Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California, 2009) in 2010 won the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Bateson Prize as well as the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Association.
Stephen Hilgartner
is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University. His research examines the social dimensions and politics of contemporary and emerging science and technology, an area he has explored through research on science advice, on risk, and on genomics. His book Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama—which examines how the authority of scientific advisory bodies is produced, contested, and maintained—won the Carson Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2002. His ethnographic research on genomics focuses on access, ownership, and control. Earlier work has examined the popularization of science and the rise and fall of collective definitions of social problems. Recent publications include “Staging High-Visibility Science: Media Orientation in Genome Research” (in The Sciences’ Media Connection, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, 2011), “Intellectual Property and the Politics of Emerging Technology” (Chicago-Kent Law Review, 2010), a chapter on expert knowledge about risk (in Comunicar los riesgos, Biblioteca Nueva, 2009), and a special issue of Science & Public Policy (October 2008) on anticipatory knowledge and the state.
Ben Hurlbut
is assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is trained in the history of the modern biomedical and life sciences and in Science and Technology Studies. His research lies at the intersection of bioethics, political theory and STS. He studies the historical development of approaches to governance of emerging technologies in the United States, focusing in particular on discourse, politics, and institutions of deliberation for contending with morally and technically complex problems. In particular, he has examined the history of the scientific, political and ethical debates around human embryo research in the United States. He examines the various settings in which ethical concerns over human embryo research were deliberated, from public ethics bodies to state level referenda, tracing how notions of democracy, religious and moral pluralism, and public reason were constructed in each setting. One purpose of his research is to bring historical and qualitative social science approaches to bear on normative problems in bioethics and political theory. Ben received an A.B. in Classics from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Alan Irwin
is Professor and Dean of Research at Copenhagen Business School. From 2008-10, he chaired the UK BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) Strategy Panel on ‘Bioscience for Society’. Alan Irwin has published on science and technology policy, scientific governance, risk, and science-public relations. His books include Risk and the Control of Technology (1985), Citizen Science (1995), Sociology and the Environment (2001) and (with Mike Michael) Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge (2003). He was co-editor (with Brian Wynne) of Misunderstanding Science? (1996). His most recent research has been on the governance of science – including work with the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on expert advice in the policy process. In 2009, he was awarded the David Edge prize for his paper ‘The politics of talk: coming to terms with the ‘new’ scientific governance’ (Social Studies of Science, 2006). He is an Honorary Fellow of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Myles Jackson
is the Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Polytechnic Institute of New York University, where he runs the STS program. He is also Professor of the History of Science at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, His past work offered cultural histories of German physics in the 18th and 19th centuries and owed much to the sociology of scientific knowledge. His current work investigates how intellectual property has both shaped andbeen shaped by molecular biology over the past thirty years.
Sheila Jasanoff
is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in studying the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies, she has authored more than 100 articles and chapters and is author or editor of a dozen books, including Controlling Chemicals, The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, and Designs on Nature. Known for her prominent role in building in the field of Science and Technology Studies, she was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell University (1991-1998). She has held guest professorships at numerous institutions, including MIT, Cambridge (UK), Kyoto, and the. University of Vienna. Jasanoff has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Among her many academic grants and honors are a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ehrenkreuz from the Government of Austria, and a fellowship at the Berlin Center for Advanced Study. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente.
Andrew Jewett
is Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University. His work lies at the intersection of political and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the political roles that academic scholars have played in the United States since the Civil War. In my his first book, To Make America Scientific: Science, Democracy, and the University Before the Cold War(forthcoming in 2011), he examines a heterogeneous series of attempts by university-based scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring the critical resources of science (especially social science) to bear on American public discourse. His current project, Against the Technostructure: Critics of Scientism Since the New Deal, explores how critiques of the social sciences have circulated between groups ranging across the political spectrum, including the postwar New Right, the 1960s New Left, and more recent neoconservatives, communitarians, and Christian conservatives. Prior to arriving at Harvard in 2007 he held fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities, and taught courses at Yale, Vanderbilt, Cornell, and NYU.
Pierre-Benoit Joly
is an economist and sociologist, and is Directeur de recherche at the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in France. He is the Director of the IFRIS (French Institute for Research, Innovation and Society).Since 1996, his research activities are focused on the governance of collective risks, socio-technical controversies, the use of scientific advice in public decision making and the forms of public participation in scientific activities. He was a Member of the expert group “Science and Governance”, at the European Commission and he is member of the Council of the European Association for the Social Studies of Sciences and Technology (EASST). He has published about one hundred articles (of which more than 50 in refereed journals), three books and he has coordinated five special issues of social sciences journals. He lectures at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) on Science, expertise and public debate »and at Sciences Po Paris on Risk Governance.
David Kaiser
is a Professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and a Senior Lecturer in MIT’s Department of Physics. He is author of the award-winning book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), which traces how Richard Feynman’s idiosyncratic to quantum physics entered the mainstream. His most recent book, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W. W. Norton, 2011), will be published this spring. Honors include awards from the American Physical Society, the History of Science Society, and the British Society for the History of Science. In 2010, Kaiser was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has also received several teaching awards from Harvard and MIT.
Douglas Kysar
is Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His teaching and research areas include torts, environmental law, and risk regulation. He received his B.A. summa cum laude from Indiana University in 1995 and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1998 where he served on the student board of advisors. He has published articles on a wide array of environmental law and tort law topics, and is co-author of a leading casebook, The Torts Process, with James A. Henderson, Jr., Richard N. Pearson & John A. Siliciano. His recent book, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity (YUP 2010), seeks to reinvigorate environmental law and policy by offering novel theoretical insights on cost-benefit analysis, the precautionary principle, and sustainable development.
Andrew Lakoff
is Associate Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Communication at the University of Southern California, and Director of the USC Research Cluster in Science, Technology and Society. He received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley, and was an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Medicine at Harvard. He is the author of Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, and editor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices (with Adriana Petryna and Arthur Kleinman), Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (with Stephen J. Collier), and Disaster and the Politics of Intervention. His current research concerns the articulation of security and public health expertise around the problem of emerging disease.
Brice Laurent
is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Ecole des Mines, in Paris, France. Through the analysis of controversies in various empirical sites such as science museums, standardization organizations and participatory devices, his work attempts to describe problematizations of nanotechnology, and the political orders they imply. Brice Laurent received a M.S. from Ecole des Mines and a MA. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Since 2005, he has been employed by the French ministry of economy as ingénieur des mines.
Javier Lezaun
is James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford. He received a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University, and has taught at the London School of Economics and Amherst College. He has researched the political dimensions of biotechnology and transgenic life, as well as the uses of STS for political theory. Javier has just launched the project BioProperty, ‘Biomedical Research and the Future of Property Rights’, funded by the European Research Council.
Michael Lynch
is a Professor in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. His books and articles published over the past three decades describe the organization of discourse and practical actions in research laboratories, clinical case conferences, criminal courts, and government tribunals. His most recent book (with Simon Cole, Ruth McNally and Kathleen Jordan) examines the interplay between law and science in criminal cases involving DNA evidence (Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting [Chicago, 2008]). He is Editor of the journal Social Studies of Science, and was President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) from 2007 through 2009.
Manjari Mahajan
is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York. She held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council before joining the New School. She received her doctorate from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University in 2008. Her research interests are in the politics of global health, and the role of STS in development thought and policy. She has worked on the AIDS epidemic in India and South Africa, the politics of agricultural biotechnology in the global South, and the role of intellectual property regimes in shaping ethics and practice in public health and biomedical research in India. She is currently working on a book manuscript that is provisionally titled The Anatomy of Humanitarian Emergencies: Science, Citizenship, and Global Governance of the AIDS Epidemics of India and South Africa.
Clark Miller
is Co-PI and Associate Director of Center for Nanotechnology in Society, Associate Director, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, Chair of the PhD Program in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, and Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. His research focuses on science and technology policy, including particular emphases on the governance of new and emerging technologies and the global politics of expertise. Before joining ASU, he taught at Wisconsin and Iowa State and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also is a recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award and over a dozen other major grants, including a Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education award. He is co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, both in electrical engineering.
Nelly Oudshoorn
is a professor of Technology Dynamics and Healthcare at the Department of Science, Technology, and Policy Studies at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. Her research interests and publications include the dynamics of user-technology relations. She is the author of Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (Routledge 1994); The Male Pill. A Biography of a Technology in the Making (Duke University Press, 2003, winner of the Rachel Carson Prize 2005); and Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare (forthcoming at Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor of Bodies that Matter: Women’s Involvement with Reproductive Medicine (Ohio University Press 2000), and How Users matter. The Co-Construction of Users and Technology (MIT Press 2003). Her current research focuses on the development of constructive technology assessment (CTA) tools that take into account the perspective of users.
Shobita Parthasarathy
is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. She holds a Bachelors degree in Biology from the University of Chicago, and Masters and PhD degrees in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the governance of emerging science and technology, with a focus on areas that have uncertain ethical, social, environmental, health, legal, and political implications. Her research has appeared in various journals including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Science & Public Policy, Public Health Genomics, and Genetics in Medicine. Her first book, entitled, Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), compared the development of genetic testing for breast cancer in the United States and Britain. Her current book project compares the politics of patents on life forms and traditional knowledge in the United States and Europe.
Antoine Picon
is Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Co-Director of Doctoral Programs (PhD & DDes) at the GSD. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian of science and art, Picon is best known for his work in the history of architectural technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary “deep structures” of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. In addition to six other books, Picon has also published numerous articles, mostly dealing with the complementary histories of architecture and technology. Picon received engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, an architecture degree from the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris-Villemin, and a doctorate in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Trevor Pinch
is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. He works mainly in the fields of sociology of science, sociology of technology, sociology of economics, and sound studies. Recent books include Dr Golem: How To Think About Medicine (with Harry Collins, Chicago University Press, 2005) and Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies (edited with Richard Swedberg, MIT Press, 2008). He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (with Karin Bijsterveld, Oxford University Press, 2011).
Anne Pollock
is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech. Trained in Science, Technology & Society at MIT, her research focuses on biomedicine and culture. She is particularly interested in how medical categories and technologies are enrolled in telling stories about identity and difference, especially with regard to race, gender, and citizenship. She is currently revising her book manuscript about the intersecting trajectories of race, pharmaceuticals, and cardiovascular disease in the United States from the founding of cardiology to the commercial failure of BiDil. She is also engaged in ongoing projects in three areas: feminism and heart disease; American health disparities and citizenship claims; and global pharmaceuticals amid economic crisis and the pharmaceuticalization of philanthropy.
Theodore M. Porter
is professor of history of science in the UCLA Department of History. His most recent books are The Cambridge of Science, volume 7: Modern Social Sciences, coedited with Dorothy Ross (2003), and Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2004). In an earlier era he wrote The Rise of Statistical Thinking (1986) and Trust in Numbers (1995). Just now he is exploring the uses of and statistical recording practices and field work in Europe and North America from about 1820 to 1920 to investigate heredity in insane asylums, schools for the “feeble-minded,” prisons, and Cambridge University. He is interested especially in the historical relations between the rise of human genetics and institutions of social welfare. On the side, he has written some recent papers on issues of science and public reason, including “How Science Became Technical” and “Thin Description.”
Krishanu Saha
studied Chemical Engineering at Cornell University and at the University of California in Berkeley. In his dissertation with Professors David Schaffer and Kevin Healy, he worked on experimental and computational analyses of neural stem cell development, as well as the design of new materials for adult stem cell culture. In 2007 he became a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 2006 he has done research on human embryonic stem cells and the institutional policies surrounding them. As a Society in Science: Branco-Weiss Fellow, Kris is expanding his background in working with nascent human engineered materials to investigate the modeling of diseases at the cellular level with human “reprogrammed” stem cell lines. Concurrent with his laboratory research, he also works with Professor Sheila Jasanoff in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University.
Sonja Schmid
is an assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. Her research connects Cold War history of science and technology with energy policy and security studies, especially technology transfer and nuclear nonproliferation. Fluent in Russian, she investigates the origins and organizational specifics of nuclear industries in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and studies the ways national energy policies, technological choices, and nonproliferation concerns shape each other. Her manuscript on the history of Soviet reactor design choices (currently under review at MIT Press) is based on extensive archival research in Russia and on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry. Before joining Virginia Tech, Sonja held postdoctoral appointments at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. She received her PhD in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell.
Suman Seth
is a historian of the physical sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His work looks at the history of theoretical practices, the importance of pedagogy and training, and the social and cultural resources crucial for the development of scientific work. He is the author of Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT, 2010) and the editor of a special issue of Postcolonial Studies (2009) on “Science, Colonialism, Postcolonialism.” He is currently at work on a history of science and colonialism in the German-Chinese Protectorate of Qingdao, 1897-1914.
David Stark
is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University where he is Chair of the Department of Sociology and also directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. His most recent book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, was published by Princeton University Press in 2009. Stark studies how organizations and their members search for what is valuable. Dissonance – disagreement about the principles of worth – can lead to discovery. To study the organizational basis for innovation, he has carried out ethnographic field research in Hungarian factories before and after 1989, in new media start-ups in Manhattan before and after the dot.com crash, and in a World Financial Center trading room before and after the attack on September 11th. With Balazs Vedres he is conducting historical network analysis on how creative teams assemble and disassemble. With Daniel Beunza he is studying reflexive modeling and systemic risk. Various papers are available at http://www.thesenseofdissonance.com/index.php
Jeannie Suk
is Jeannie Suk is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow and appointed Senior Fellow of the Humanities Center at Harvard. Before joining the faculty in 2006, she served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court, and to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was educated at Yale (B.A. 1995) and at Oxford (D.Phil 1999) where she was a Marshall Scholar. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D. 2002), where she was Chair of the Harvard Law Review’s Articles office. Her writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Wall Street Journal, Slate, and elsewhere. Her most recent book, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution is Transforming Privacy, was awarded the Herbert Jacob Prize by the Law and Society Association.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Duke University Press, 2006) and the editor of Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics and Governance in Global Markets (Duke University Press, 2011). His work explores the relationships between the life sciences and global capital, with a specific empirical focus on the United States and India. He is currently working on a number of projects relating to aspects of pharmaceutical development in the Indian context, such as global clinical trials, intellectual property regimes, and translational research.
James Wilsdon
is Director of the Science Policy Centre at the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science. The Centre’s work is organised under four themes – sustainability, diplomacy, innovation and governance – and its recent reports include ‘Geoengineering the Climate: science, governance and uncertainty’ (Sept 2009), ‘Reaping the Benefits: science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture’ (Nov 2009), ‘New frontiers in science diplomacy’ (Jan 2010), ‘The Scientific Century’ (March 2010) and ‘Knowledge, Networks and Nations’ (March 2011). Prior to joining the Royal Society in 2008, James spent seven years as Head of Science and Innovation at the think tank Demos, where his publications included ‘The Atlas of Ideas’ (2007), ‘China: the next science superpower?’ (2007), ‘The Public Value of Science’ (2005) and ‘See-through Science’ (2004).
David E. Winickoff
is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Society at University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental, Policy and Management (ESPM). He holds degrees from Yale University (BA), Cambridge University, UK (BA, MA), and Harvard Law School (JD), and completed a two-year Post-Doc at Harvard in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Professor Winickoff writes widely at the interface of law, STS and public policy. He has published 33 articles on a variety of topics, including genomics, intellectual property, geoengineering, food regulation, and human subjects research. These have appeared in journals such as Science, New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, and the Yale Journal of International Law. In 2007, he was chosen as a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics. He is currently the Associate Director of the Science, Technology and Society Center at U.C. Berkeley.
Langdon Winner
is the Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His writings cover a wide range of topics about the politics of technology. Most recently, he has been studying democracy and the Internet in Spain with the support of a Fulbright Scholarship.
Brian Wynne
is Professor of Science Studies and Associate Director of the UK ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Cesagen, at Lancaster University. Originally a doctoral natural scientist at Cambridge University (PhD materials science, 1971), he retrained in history, philosophy and sociology of science at The Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, and gained an M.Phil in Sociology of Science in 1977. The central intellectual project of his career has been to develop a sociological understanding of scientific knowledge in public arenas. This has mainly involved showing how scientific knowledge in diverse public issues for example involving risk, embodies unacknowledged social and normative commitments. Reflecting this analytical interest, Brian has also involved his work in many forms of public policy engagement. His first case-study, an engaged participant observation, of the 1977 Windscale nuclear public inquiry, (Rationality and Ritual, 1982) has just been republished by Earthscan. Reflecting his sustained contribution, Brian was awarded the 2010 J.D. Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science.