Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Harvard Kennedy School of Government | Harvard University
Jenny Reardon

Jenny Reardon

UC Santa Cruz


reardon1 (at) ucsc.edu


Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. She founded and directs the Science and Justice Research Center at UCSC.

After undergraduate and postgraduate training in developmental and molecular biology, Reardon earned her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University in August 2002. From Fall 1999–Spring 2002, she was a Fellow in Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She taught in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University from 2002–2004, and was a fellow at the Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy and a research assistant professor in Women’s Studies at Duke University from 2004–2005.

Her first book, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, was published with Princeton University Press in 2005. Reviews of the book appeared in Science, Nature, The New Republic, EMBO, Isis and the American Anthropologist.

In the Fall of 2006, Reardon coordinated the launch of the Science and Justice initiative at UC Santa Cruz. This initiative led to the creation of the NSF-supported Science and Justice Graduate Training Program, a unique endeavor that brings graduate students together from across the natural and social sciences, engineering and the arts to generate modes of inquiry that can enable a diversity of livable technoscientific worlds. She currently directs the recently launched Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz.

In all her work, Reardon seeks to innovate spaces and languages capable of facilitating reflection and deliberation in an age increasingly mediated by emergent new forms of technoscience. She is currently at work on her second manuscript (under contract with University of Chicago), The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome, a book she will be finishing while in residence in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science in the Fall of 2015.

Selected Publications

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