Yvonne Frankfurth is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology & Society at Harvard Kennedy School. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. A sociologist of reproduction, technology, and the state, she studies how states govern the beginnings of life through law and reproductive technologies, and how these practices shape, and are shaped by, moral and political understandings of life, family, and desirable futures. Her current research spans cross-border fertility care, AI-based donor matching, and polygenic embryo screening.

Her book project, The Nation in the Embryo: Reproductive Law, Transnational Practice, and Algorithmic Futures, examines how law and technology connect intimate decisions about having children to the making of nations and reproductive markets. Bringing research on German reproductive law and cross-border fertility care into conversation with her current work on data-driven reproductive technologies, it traces how ideas of life, kinship, and belonging are negotiated through personal decisions, legal categories, and commercial practices.

Her research combines multi-sited fieldwork, in-depth interviews, legal and policy analysis, and digital ethnography. She is an affiliate of the Cambridge Reproduction Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and was a visiting doctoral researcher at Yale University. She contributes to public debates on reproductive law and fertility care.