Current Fellows

Erik Aarden

Erik Aarden is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow sponsored by the European Union Seventh Framework Program. During his stay with the Harvard STS Program he will be working on the research project ‘Negotiating local and global requirements in biomedical research: the case of biobanking’. In this project he will study the use of biobanks as global infrastructures for research in genomics in relation to their localized configuration in particular places around the globe. Themes of particular interest are both global and local (ethical) governance of biobanks, interactions between global standardization and local operability and considerations underlying donor recruitment and object of study.

Elizabeth Barron

Elizabeth Barron holds a joint appointment as a postdoctoral fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where she is working with Dr. Anne Pringle. Her research, broadly, examines the formation and uses of environmental knowledge for environmental governance and conservation. Elizabeth has a B.S. in Anthropology and Biological Aspects of Conservation and a M.S. in Forest Resources. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at Rutgers University in 2010 for her dissertation work documenting the emerging field of fungal conservation in the United States and Europe, and its impacts on federal land management and policy in the USA.

Tom Bauler

Tom Bauler is a Spring 2013 Visiting Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School and Assistant Professor and Chair of Environment and Economics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where he teaches ecological economics. His research focuses on the governance of alternative indicators for well-being, particularly on the dynamics of “beyond-GDP” indicators and the institutionalization of the policy agenda. Tom also conducts a series of research efforts on “governance of transitions” from the perspective of grassroots innovations. While at the STS Program, he will investigate the dynamics of current American actors in this domain with the objective to elaborate on a comparative analysis of the respective US and European policy agendas.

Ruha Benjamin

Ruha Benjamin is a Visiting Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School for academic year 2013-2014. She is also an American Council of Learned Societies fellow on leave from Boston University, where she serves as assistant professor of Sociology and African American studies. While at Harvard, Ruha is completing a book People’s Science: Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), which examines struggles over public participation in the implementation of California’s stem cell initiative. She is also continuing work on a second project entitled Provincializing Science, which investigates the interplay between folk ethnoracial taxonomies, government classifications, and population genomics in South Africa, India, and Mexico.

Laurence Delina

Laurence L. Delina  is a Spring 2013 Visiting Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. While at the STS Program, Laurence will work to advance his argument on the necessity of a three-actor arrangement (state-civic-corporate) in knowledge-making and governance of rapid climate mitigation. Laurence is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is also an Earth System Governance Fellow and an Associate at the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Friederike Gesing

Friederike Gesing is a social/cultural anthropologist and a visiting research fellow with the Harvard STS Program during the 2012-2013 academic year.  She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bremen’s Department of Social Sciences and is affiliated with the Research Centre for Sustainability Studies (artec). While at Harvard, she will be writing up her ethnography on emerging forms of coastal hazard protection in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her work focuses on so-called “soft” approaches of dealing with coastal erosion which are commonly framed as “working with, not against nature”.

Mads Dahl Gjefsen

Mads Dahl Gjefsen is a PhD student at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo. His doctoral project examines framing and expertise in policy debates on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) in Norway and the United States. He focuses in particular on the role of environmental organizations as mediators of knowledge, and on their attempts to address tensions between different local, national and global concerns in relation to CCS and related environmental issues.

Connie Johnston

Connie Johnston is currently a doctoral candidate at the Clark University Graduate School of Geography and a visiting fellow with the Harvard STS Program for the academic year 2012-2013. She also has a Master of Arts in Graduate Liberal Studies from Duke University. Her dissertation research examines, in the United States and Europe, the scientific construction and social negotiation of the concept of farm animal welfare through the activities of three (two US and one European) government-sponsored scientific research programs. She received a 2011-2012 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant to support her fieldwork. As  Harvard STS Fellow, she will complete the analysis and write-up of the results of her research interviews and field observations.

Ingrid Metzler

Ingrid Metzler is currently a Spring 2013 Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School.. While at Harvard, Ingrid will work on a project with Sheila Jasanoff and colleauges, titled “Biology and the Law," funded by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Her research focuses on the governance of disruptive bio-medical technologies She is interested in particular in the ways in which law and science mutually shape and co-produce each other.

Tolu Odumosu

Tolu Odumosu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with a joint appointment with the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program. Topically, his research is focused on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), with particular emphasis on mobile devices and their appropriation, the design and implementation of national telecommunications infrastructure, and the governance of transnational ICT technical standards organizations. Theoretically, most of Dr. Odumosu's work focuses on developing and expanding the notion of "constitutive appropriation" as an analytical framework, geared towards a more robust theory of democratic participation that includes both human and non-human elements.

Sebastian Pfotenhauer

Sebastian is a post-doctoral researcher on science, innovation, and higher education policy based at the MIT Technology & Policy Program and the MIT Portugal Program, and a fellow at the Harvard Program Science, Technology and Society. His research interests revolve around strategies for capacity building in innovation and higher education, international university collaborations, the interrelation of innovation and education, the governance of complex socio-technical systems, and the physics of lasers and plasmas. In particular, he is interested in the role of complex international innovation partnerships as instruments for economic and societal development, and the global circulation of innovation models and best practices, for example in the case of MIT's international collaborations. He also enjoys teaching graduate level classes in science and technology policy at MIT. 

Gustavo Ribeiro

Gustavo Ribeiro is a visiting fellow with the Harvard STS Program for the academic year 2012-2013 and  a doctoral student at Harvard Law School, from where he also received his LL.M degree.  Gustavo received a bachelor's degree (summa cum laude), from Fundação Getúlio Vargas Law School in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil, where he is still a Fellow at the Research Center for Law and Economics and a Visiting Lecturer. His research focuses mainly on legal philosophy, philosophy of science, and science and technology studies. Gustavo is currently working on a National Science Foundation project with Sheila Jasanoff and colleagues on scientific evidence, with special focus on the Supreme Court’s 1993 Daubert decision and its subsequent impact on law and science at the U.S. and, potentially, other jurisdictions.

Mattijs J. van Maasakkers

Mattijs is a pre-doctoral fellow with the Harvard STS Program for the 2012-2013 academic year and a PhD-candidate in environmental planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also the Assistant Director of the MIT Science Impact Collaborative, which works on the analysis and development of effective conflict resolution techniques in environmental disputes. His dissertation focuses on the creation of markets for ecosystem services in the United States. As an STS Fellow, he will continue work on his dissertation and serve as a teaching fellow for ESPP-78: Environmental, an undergraduate course at Harvard College taught by Sheila Jasanoff.

Trina Vithayathil

Trina Vithayathil is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Brown University and a visiting research fellow with the Harvard STS Program for the 2012-2013 academic year. During her time with the Harvard STS Program, she will be working on her dissertation, which is a qualitative study of the production of social data during a contemporary census in India. As part of this research, she draws upon the contributions of science, technology and society (STS) studies, political sociology, and India area studies to explore the network of actors involved in producing official data. She is funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development T-32 Fellowship.