Student Directory
Students
Martin Abbott
Martin Abbott is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His research is focused on how new and emerging technologies and environmental change intersect in the city. Martin holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Technology, Sydney, and a Master of Arts in Political Sociology from Sciences Po Paris.
Larry Au
Larry is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Columbia University. He is broadly interested in the intersections of STS and expertise with economic and political sociology. His dissertation examines the rise of precision medicine—the use of genomics and other big data approaches to improve diagnosis and treatment—in China and the United States, focusing on the diffusion of the concept and its associated technologies, as well as the ways in which debates around ethical, legal, and social issues are constructed locally and globally. He is also interested in the recent controversies over human gene editing and the modernization of traditional medicines.
Marissa Bell
Marissa Bell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at SUNY University at Buffalo. Her research draws from energy justice, environmental governance, and the political economy of risk. Her dissertation examines procedure and perceptions of legitimacy in the implementation of consent-based nuclear waste siting in Ontario, Canada. She holds a BA in Geography from King’s College London, an MA in Economic Geography from the University at Buffalo, and has past research experience involving localized opposition to wind turbine installation in upstate New York, nuclear risk perception post-Fukushima, and issues of contested geopolitical identity during Croatia’s EU accession.
Marie Bernal
Marie is originally from Mexico City and an architect by training. She practiced luxury residential and luxury retail design after graduating from the University of Notre Dame. But she has always had a passion for teaching and, seeking to become a full time academic, she began my postgraduate studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the division of Public Policy, and her research focuses on the effect of risk perception and mental models of risk on regulation. She is particularly interested in emergent risk regulation and management in the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors.
Ulrika Bjare
Ulrika Bjare is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Science, Technology and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. Ulrika has a background in political science and studies the interaction between science, the surrounding society, policy-making and governance. The focus of her dissertation is on university governance and researchers’ perceptions of steering and autonomy in relation to academic practices. In parallel to the PhD-studies Ulrika works as an Analyst at the Precedent’s Office at Stockholm University and has worked as a Special Adviser at the Swedish Ministry for Education and Research.
Misha Bykowski
Misha Bykowski is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research asks how the expansion of home security in contemporary Japan reflects changing attitudes regarding the country’s safety—from a once free good produced through strong community ties, to a commodity residents now purchase. Through the lens of private security products, her work examines how locks, intercoms, and sensors articulate new norms of protection, showing how the home’s securitization not only reflects changing crime rates, but maps onto pressing concerns over demographic shifts, social atomization, illegal aliens, and changing family structures.
Alberto de Salvatierra
Alberto de Salvatierra is Founder and Principal of PROXIIMA and a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the UNLV School of Architecture—where he founded and coordinates the interdisciplinary Global Studios Program and @LAS, a new interdisciplinary research laboratory. A multilingual and bi-cultural polymath, architectural designer, and landscape urbanist, Alberto holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and both a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscape and Ecology from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Prior to UNLV, he taught ecological design at Cornell University, architecture foundations at the Boston Architectural College, and landscape architecture at GSD’s Design Discovery.
David C. Eisenhauer
David’s research focuses in the New Jersey shore region combines theories and methods from human geography, the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and political theory to examine the drivers of climate vulnerability as well as to identify strategies for fostering sustainable development pathways. Currently, he is working on two research projects. The first is a historical study of how the prevailing socio-technical imaginary of the Jersey Shore emerged during the past two centuries. The second is an ethnographic study of emerging alternative coastal management strategies that are capable of responding to the social and ecological urgencies of the Anthropocene.
Kieran Findlater
Kieran is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, affiliated with the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He is primarily interested in climate-adaptive decision making by individuals, organizations and societies in the context of high uncertainty and competing objectives. He has 14 years of experience in policy-relevant research and analysis related to climate change, including ongoing research projects on climate services for institutional decision making, biotech-enabled adaptation policy in the forestry sector, farmers’ climate-adaptive decision making, and public perceptions of environmental and health risks more broadly. His past work has also included research on energy, water and agricultural policies. He holds a Ph.D. in Resources, Environment and Sustainability and an M.Sc. in Resource Management and Environmental Studies, both from the University of British Columbia, as well as a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences / Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Alberta.
Ekin Genc
Ekin has a professional and academic background in public policy. Graduating with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from LSE in 2014, he spent two years working in Brussels and Washington before setting up a policy consulting company in London, through which he is currently working with clients such as the UK government, UNICEF, and Al Jazeera. In preparation of DPhil (PhD), he is also reading for an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow at Newspeak House, an emerging ‘college of political technologists’ in London.
Rajiv Ghimire
Rajiv is a fourth year PhD student in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University. His background is in Environmental Science and he is an international student from Nepal. He is fascinated by novel ideas such as Climate Smart Agriculture and he fears that many such programs (and experts involved) see people as passive recipients of technology. However, he sees the need of collaboration, engagement, and citizen science. His PhD research focuses on food-energy-water nexus to explore how experts contribute to policy decisions. Whose science counts, and how can we involve lay people?
Karen Huang
Karen Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in Organizational Behavior with a secondary field in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Harvard University. Karen is also a Fellow in the STS Program at Harvard, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Karen’s research examines expertise and techno-optimism within engineering and entrepreneurial communities, and the development of micro-targeting practices in predicting and influencing human behavior. She holds a M.A. in Psychology from Harvard University, and a B.A. in Ethics, Politics & Economics, with a concentration in phenomenology, from Yale University.
Alana Lajoie-O’Malley
Alana Lajoie-O’Malley is a PhD student in Sociology at The University of Ottawa. She is interested in how science and expertise are deployed by actors engaging with environmental controversies, especially climate change. She arrived at this interest through a decade working with universities, government, and NGOs on environmental and climate projects, most recently as Senior Advisor, Research & Sustainability at The University of Winnipeg and as co-founder of a community climate justice organisation. She holds a BA and BSc. from The University of Winnipeg as well as an MPhil from the University of Oxford.
Michael McGovern
Michael McGovern is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Princeton University. He studies classification and quantification practices in the human sciences and technology in the twentieth-century United States. His dissertation project follows “statistical discrimination” as a concept within the postwar American social sciences and courts. As debates raged over the death penalty, employment discrimination, sentencing standards, and affirmative action, organizations and experts across the political spectrum drew increasingly upon sophisticated statistical analysis to make arguments—they sought a ‘neutral’ middle ground that was quickly eroding beneath their feet.
Darius Meadon
Darius Meadon studied politics, law and economics at the University of Cape Town and London School of Economics. He is currently completing an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the University of Oxford. Darius has worked in marketing and communications for several technology firms and currently works for an AI healthcare technology firm. His research interests centre on the ethical implications of applying AI to medical and genomic data to develop biomarkers and therapeutic innovations.
Beza Merid
Beza Merid (Ph.D., New York University) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan affiliated with the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Merid earned his Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication. He researches how patients and caregivers deploy lived illness experiences as a form of expertise in popular and policy discourses around health care reform. Merid is particularly interested in how illness experiences are used to challenge “expertise barriers” in policy discourses, and in the social conditions necessary for these expert claims to be persuasive in public controversies like the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Jonathan Moch
Jonathan Moch is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard in Earth and Planetary Sciences and a Secondary Field student in Harvard’s Program on Science, Technology and Society. Jonathan’s research interests center on the interactions between climate change and atmospheric chemistry. Jonathan is also is also keenly interested in the intersection of science and policy, and he previously worked at the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC. Jonathan holds a S.M. in Environmental Science and Engineering from Harvard and an A.B. with high honors from the Department of Geosciences and from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.
Emanuel Moss
Emanuel Moss researches issues of fairness and accountability in AI systems, is a research assistant on the Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research (PERVADE) project, and a member of the AI on the Ground Initiative (AIGI) at the Data & Society Research Institute. He is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is studying the work of machine learning from an ethnographic perspective and the role of data scientists as producers of knowledge. He is particularly interested in how data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are shaped by organizational, economic, and ethical prerogatives. Emanuel holds a B.A. from the University of Illinois and an M.A. from Brandeis University. He has previously worked as a digital and spatial information specialist for archaeological and environmental projects in the United States and Turkey.
Cierra Robson
Hailing from Boston, Massachusetts, Cierra Robson is a doctoral student in the Sociology and Social Policy program. She holds a BA in African American Studies from Princeton University, where she specialized in studies of race and public policy and pursued a minor in Technology and Society. She is interested in how technological advancements both reinforce and revolutionize the American racial order. She tends to ask how modern public-private collaborations both solidify and make profitable existing power hierarchies. She aims to use her research to conceptualize what meaningful regulation of Big Tech looks like.
Lucy Rodina
Lucy is a scholar of urban water resilience and environmental governance. Her current research interests include water resilience to climate change impacts, with a focus on natural infrastructure, stormwater and wastewater management, and incorporating science advise in decision-making. She has a PhD in Resources, Environment and Sustainability (2018) from the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability. In her doctoral work she has studied the intersection of water governance, resilience and environmental justice in urban contexts using multiple qualitative and quantitative methodologies and a case study from Cape Town, South Africa. She also has a Master of Arts degree in Resource Management and Environmental Studies and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations. In her Master’s research she studied water governance and the human right to water in South Africa. In addition, she has also worked on water development projects in the Nepalese Himalayas, focused on building irrigation canals and shaping strategies for future community development projects. Her research interests also include water ethics and transformative water governance.
Lara Rodriguez-Delgado
Lara Rodriguez-Delgado is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the George Washington University. She received a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Puerto Rico and two master’s degrees—in American studies and Anthropology—from the City University of New York (CUNY). Lara has developed several original ethnographic projects. While at Hunter College, CUNY, she focused on the politics of labor activism and collective action in a lawsuit involving undocumented fine-dining workers. After a stint exploring how “post-neoliberal” policies in Ecuador translated into massive, state projects of science and technology reform in the Andean interior, Lara continued her interest in social movements at the intersection of controversial technologies by examining how environmental action took shape in reaction to the increase in seismicity related to fracking in Oklahoma. Her ongoing research, which is funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the U.S. Geological Survey, examines the increasing cultural and political salience of contemporary geology amid the controversial legacies and futures of oil and gas extraction in the U.S.
Mariana C. Smulski
Mariana is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Unit of Applied Neurobiology and fellow of the National Council of Scientific and Technic Research in Argentina. She is studying controversies involving the implementation of neuroscientific evidence in educational practices and state policies. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires. Her past and current projects focused on neuroscientific knowledge production, validation and circulation. This includes studies of children´s cognitive development in contexts of poverty and intervention programs designed to enhance cognition. She is a member of the Anthropology of S&T research team in the University of Buenos Aires.
Nitin Verma
Nitin is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores the nature of misinformation in politics and science by studying the relationship between human values, knowledge formation, language, and communication. He has led research that has shown that trust in science news stories is influenced by human values, political leaning, frequency of social media use, and the news outlets reporting the stories. Nitin is also interested in studying the closely related topic of pseudo-science, and has conducted (unpublished) qualitative research on knowledge formation in a local astrology community.
 Lydia Zemke
Lydia Zemke has acquired over seven years of experience at UN Environment where she worked on various policy issues at the intersection of environment, innovation and governance for the achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Her experience has provided extensive insight in the implementation of global environmental objectives in partnership with governments, organizations, multilateral development banks, business and NGOs.
Lydia’s academic background is in Political Science, Development Studies (BA) and Project Management (M.Eng). Lydia is currently pursuing studies in Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (UCL) where she is examining innovative approaches for the transition to a low-carbon, green economy. She is actively involved in numerous research and policy initiatives, including as a Policy Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge.
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