Current Fellows

Aishani Aatresh

Aishani Aatresh is pursuing an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Her interests revolve around representations of uncertainty in trans-boundary problems related to science and technology and their roles in contestations around the rights and responsibilities of citizens and institutions, especially concerning questions of global governance. She holds an AB in Complex Biosocial Systems from Harvard College.

Daniel Affsprung

Dan Affsprung is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at Arizona State University. He is a Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School and a research assistant for the Global Observatory for Genome Editing. Dan's research examines the ways scientific and technical expertise are used to support and regulate social and political functioning by defining conditions that enable individuals to act with autonomy and produce collective benefit. He studies the history of Cold War social and interdisciplinary science and the regulation of emerging technology.

Henry Austin

Henry is a Research Associate with the Global Observatory for Genome Editing and a Fellow in the STS program. Henry holds an A.B. from Harvard College where he studied Social Studies with a Secondary Field in Computer Science before graduating in 2023.

Nicole West Bassoff

Nicole West Bassoff is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is also a Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society. She uses the disciplinary approach of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to examine the ethics and politics of technology-driven urban development projects in the U.S. Through a comparative study of controversies surrounding “smart city” projects, her dissertation interrogates the social compact between cities and citizens in the digital age. She explores how the rights and duties of citizens are reformulated when cities are transformed through private investment and technological innovation.

Akshay Bhambri

Akshay Bhambri is a distinguished ICS-Harvard-Yenching Doctoral Fellow currently pursuing doctoral research on the theme 'After the Revolution, After Colonialism: A Comparative Study of the Politics of Medical Knowledge in China and India.' He was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Peking University in Beijing. Previously, he dedicated considerable time to research and Mandarin language acquisition at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei.

Margarita Boenig-Liptsin

Margarita (Margo) Boenig-Liptsin is a Research Associate at the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS). She continuing the work she began as a Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2016) with Sheila Jasanoff on a National Science Foundation funded project, "Traveling Imaginaries of Innovation: The Practice Turn and Its Transnational Implementation."  The project examines how three models of innovation have become go-to answers for socioeconomic challenges confronting 21st century nations.

Lou Lennad

Lou Lennad is a PhD student in Public Policy on the Science, Technology and Policy Studies track at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her current research focuses on the international governance of human genetics and neurotechnology. Her doctoral research will explore the contemporary construction of Europe and Europeanness through ongoing technoscientific initiatives such as the Human Brain Project and the 1+Million Genomes Project. Lou holds an MSc in STS from University College London, and three bachelor’s degrees in Political Science, Genetics, and Law.

Oliwia Mandrela

Oliwia Mandrela is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Her research explores visions of futures linked to the development of longevity biotechnology in the US and China. The aim is to better understand what futures of age manipulation are being imagined and by whom. She also examines how knowledge is produced and justified in this field, what hopes, fears, risk, and uncertainties are reflected, and what changes in our understanding of biological life may emerge from this field.

Conor McGlynn

Conor McGlynn is a PhD student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was a 2020-2021 Fulbright Scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. and a 2019-2020 Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing and previously worked in EU affairs in Brussels. He holds degrees in philosophy and economics from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin.

Onur Özgöde

Onur Özgöde is an economic sociologist whose work lies at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), sociology of expertise, American political development, and history of economic thought and political economy. He is interested in how economic expertise forms co-produces the state and the economy and, with it, socio-economic problems, such as systemic risk in financial systems, climate change, and inequality, that are produced by markets but cannot be addressed through market-based governance strategies. Onur joined the Program in Science, Technology, and Society as a Senior Research Fellow in the summer of 2020 to work on the US economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the Comparative Covid Response: Crisis, Knowledge, Politics (CompCoRe) project, led by Sheila Jasanoff and Stephen Hilgartner, Cornell University. 

Pariroo Rattan

Pariroo Rattan is a PhD candidate in the Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS) track in Public Policy program at Harvard, and is doing a secondary field in Music alongside her doctoral degree. She is a Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS). Her doctoral work studies the moral politics of the digital economy and the rise of populism in India, where she conducts ethnography on the adoption of digital biometrics and payment systems by street vendors. She also works comparatively on citizen resistance to legal data regulation regimes across the US, EU and China. Apart from digitization, Pariroo is writing about the politics of evidence in the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit, and on the acoustics and sound politics of the urban economy.

Kyoko Sato

Kyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University and Senior Researcher on the Harvard STS Program's project, “The Fukushima Disaster and the Cultural Politics of Nuclear Power in the United States and Japan”(2013-2016). The project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, with Sheila Jasanoff as the Principal Investigator, and explores how postwar nuclear governance evolved in Japan and the United States, as well as the impact of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Stefan Schäfer

Stefan Schäfer is a Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He also leads a research group at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany, and is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford. His research examines how a wide array of stakeholders, agendas, and bodies of knowledge shape the ongoing development of climate engineering as a set of imaginaries, discourses and policy options.

Hilton Simmet

Hilton Simmet is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy and a graduate research associate with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School. His research uses the methods of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and political theory to examine the constitutive role that scientific knowledge plays in addressing questions of public policy.

Justin Wong

Justin Wong is a PhD student in Science, Technology and Policy Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as a JD student in Harvard Law School. His current research interests surround national framings of science and technology within global orders: how ideas of national interests and security are naturalised, how global orders are constructed, and how notions of ownership and sovereignty are stabilised and contested on national and international levels. His doctoral research seeks to engage China through a comparative lens, bringing together aspects of STS, law, IR, and East Asian studies.