Staff Directory
 Shana Ashar
Shana Rabinowich Ashar is the Assistant Director of the Program on Science, Technology and Society. In this role, she oversees all of the STS Program’s administrative operations, finances, and events. She manages the Program’s fellowship program and administers the STS Secondary Field. In collaboration with the STS Program’s partners across the university, she serves as the lead organizer for the STS Circle, the Science and Democracy Lecture Series, and other major workshops and panels. She also provides administrative leadership for the Program’s websites, the Science and Democracy Network and the Undergraduate STS Essay Prize Competition.
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu
 Geneva Smith
Geneva Smith will be serving as the Academic Coordinator for the 2019 STS Summer School at Harvard. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Science, Technology and Society Program and a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology with a PhD Fellowship from the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico. Her interests lie in improving policy-making and outcomes through closer attention to the social dimensions of public policy. While at Harvard, Geneva will ethnographically study the co-production of agricultural biotechnology and economic justice in Argentina.
geneva_smith@hks.harvard.edu
Hilton Simmet
Hilton Simmet is a Research Associate in the STS Program and a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. His dissertation will look at the intersection of STS with economics and political theory in order to examine how universal measures of human well-being and progress shape local politics against historically and culturally situated intellectual traditions. As part of his doctoral work, he has conducted research in Bangalore, India on the National Science Foundation project “Traveling Imaginaries: A Comparative Study of Three Models of Innovation in Transnational Implementation” and he will be working on the transnational “Transformations to Sustainability (T2S)” project with the Belmont Forum.
Alessandro Allegra
Alessandro Allegra is a 2018-2019 Visiting Research Fellow and a Fulbright-Schuman Scholar with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a doctoral candidate in STS at University College London (UCL), working on the role of cultural differences in the provision of scientific advice to policymaking in the European Union.
Gili Vidan
Gili Vidan is a Fellow at the Harvard STS Program and a PhD student at the Harvard History of Science Department. Her work is broadly concerned with questions of governance at the intersection of digital information technologies, law, and politics. Gili’s dissertation traces technical attempts to solve the problems of trust and transparency, especially through the development of electronic payment systems and public key cryptography in late 20th- and early 21st-century U.S.
Prior to starting her PhD at Harvard, Gili earned a MSc in Social Science of the Internet at Oxford University, where her research focused on cryptocurrencies, mobile technology, and digital geographies, and a BA in Social Studies with a secondary in Computer Science from Harvard College.
Harry Begg
Harry is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, where he focuses on the politics of post-crisis reform after the 2007/8 global financial crisis. His thesis is a study of the US, the UK and Australia, and compares how financial policymaking institutions in these countries responded to the collapse of a sociotechnical system and navigated opportunities for reform. This work also interrogates how global banks themselves responded to the existential challenges of ’07/’08, for example through the utilisation of corporate networks to negotiate and interpret new regulatory frameworks (e.g. Dodd-Frank in the US; the Banking Reform Act in the UK). Harry was the Michael von Clemm Fellow at Harvard in 2016-17, and he holds MSc and MA (Oxon) degrees from University College London and the University of Oxford respectively. Prior to returning to Oxford for his doctoral studies, Harry worked at a consulting group in Washington, DC.
 Kelsey Ichikawa
Kelsey Ichikawa is a fourth year undergraduate at Harvard concentrating jointly in Neurobiology and Philosophy. She is the undergrad assistant for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Science, Technology and Society Program. Outside of coursework, she does research in the Harvard Intergroup Neuroscience Lab led by Prof. Mina Cikara. Her senior thesis is about computational models and neural mechanisms of intergroup harm, as well as the implicated ethics and responsibilities for individuals’ brain states. In collaboration with Prof. Nicole Nelson, she also conducts research on the contemporary reproducibility crisis in science.
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