Current Fellows

Alberto Aparicio

Alberto Aparicio is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Global Observatory for Genome Editing (https://global-observatory.org) at the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include the governance of biotechnology and societal responses to shifting meanings and attitudes about life in contemporary bioscience, as well as the framing and social relevance of technoscience. In his previous research project at Instituto Alexander von Humboldt (Colombia), he examined the role of the value of biodiversity in imagining and shaping Colombian bioeconomy policy. Alberto completed his PhD at the Department of Science and Technology Studies of University College London in 2019, where he studied the construction of safety in synthetic biology by scientists as responsible governance.

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.

Nicole is interested broadly in the ethics of emerging technologies and has taught for courses ranging from “Philosophy of Technology” to “Bioethics, Law, and the Life Sciences.” She is a co-founder and organizer of the annual Graduate Research in STS (GRiSTS) conference at Harvard. Prior to the PhD, she worked for the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative at the Berkman Klein Center. Nicole holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge and a BA in History and Science from Harvard University.

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.

Sarah Delvaux

Sarah is a doctoral researcher at the Spiral Research Center in the Department of Political Science of the University of Liège, and a research fellow in the Science, Technology and Society Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She holds a double master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Liège and in European Studies on Society, Science and Technology from the University of Maastricht. Before starting her PhD, she worked for two years at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO/Energyville) as researcher (R&D) in energy and climate strategy. She worked on the policy and societal aspects of the integrated analysis of sustainable energy systems and was involved in interdisciplinary European and Flemish research projects. Her doctoral research investigates the ‘promoted’ side of the low-carbon transition. It explores the co-production of innovation, politico-economic, and the socio-ecological orders in the context of promising innovative solutions and market making towards sustainable modes of production in Belgium. Sarah also works on a research project LAMARTRA which aims to bridge decarbonization and labor market in sustainability transitions, in the framework of which her PhD is funded.

Elizabeth Dietz

Elizabeth Dietz is a PhD Candidate in the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University and a visiting Fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society. Previously, they were a project manager and research assistant at The Hastings Center, a nonprofit bioethics research institute in Garrison NY.  Dietz writes about disability, epistemologies of choice, reproductive ethics, and how bureaucrats work to enact justice through the relationship between information and decision-making. Their dissertation project examines how informed consent, so often imagined to enshrine liberty and gird individual autonomy, can also serve as a tool though which individuals are made responsible for systemic injustices. Examining non-invasive prenatal testing and genetic counseling, opposition to DNA testing at the US border, and policies around choice and responsibility during the Covid-19 pandemic, Dietz theorizes informed consent to structure sites through which personhood and capacity are assessed in a purportedly uncontroversial fashion – with profound implications for queer and disabled lives.

Gabriel Dorthe

Gabriel is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Trust in Science Project at Harvard University (directed by Sheila Jasanoff), co-affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies Potsdam (Germany). His research project is entitled “Bodies of Suspicion: Distrust in Science - Online and Beyond”. He holds a PhD in philosophy and environmental humanities (University Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne & University of Lausanne).

Spencer Doyle

Spencer Doyle is a Ph.D. candidate in physics and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow at Harvard University. He is also completing a secondary field in the Science, Technology, and Society program. As an STS fellow, Spencer is interested in the social construction of federal policies concerning the nation’s energy infrastructure and funding of science: how plans for our future energy grids come to be, with a particular focus on nuclear energy; and how research directions in large fields of scientific research are formed, prioritized, and funded.

Karl Dudman

Karl Dudman is a Fulbright postgraduate scholar and PhD candidate at the University of Oxford's Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. With a background in anthropology, climate change politics and communication, Karl's research explores the co-production of public climate 'silence' in the US. His ongoing fieldwork, hosted by the North Carolina State Climate Office, examines how actors within climate science, coastal management and local politics navigate accelerating sea level rise in the context of widespread ambivalence towards the mainstream climate change narrative. Karl is also a photographer, and through his work explores the politics of competing cultural relationships with landscapes, and their subsequent representation.

Sam Weiss Evans

Sam Weiss Evans is a Research Fellow with the Program for Science, Technology, and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Research Associate John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Sam is involved in many aspects of the work of the Program, and his current projects include research on security governance of science and emerging technology, and methods for STS researchers to engage with engineers and scientists on the social and political aspects of very early stage research. He is also the Project Coordinator for the Trust in Science project (in collaboration with the Harvard Data Science Initiative)

Péricles Gonçalves

Péricles Gonçalves is a PhD candidate in Regulatory Law at FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School, where he has been a research scholar in Law and executive coordinator of the Research Centers project and the Regulation by Numbers project. His research interest is on risk regulation. His doctoral thesis aims to develop a model of risk-based regulation for the Brazilian reality based on the notion of risk as a social construction. In his previous research project at FGV Rio de Janeiro Law School, he examined the role of insurance companies as corporate risk regulators. He was a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Irvine (2018) and he has been a lawyer since 2003.

Wanheng Hu

Wanheng Hu is a Ph.D. candidate in Science and Technology Studies with an affiliation to the East Asia Program at Cornell University. He is currently a visiting research fellow in the Science, Technology & Society Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. His dissertation examines the use of machine learning (ML) algorithms to cope with expert tasks, with an empirical focus on the development, application, and regulation of ML systems for image-based medical diagnosis in China. He is particularly interested in the mutual shaping of expert practices and emerging technologies. His research is broadly situated at the intersection of the sociology of expertise, medical sociology, critical data/algorithm studies, and development studies. Wanheng holds an M.Phil. in Philosophy of Science and Technology, a B.L. in Sociology, and a B.Sc. in Biomedical English, all from Peking University.

Nicolas Huppenbauer

Nicolas is a PhD candidate at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn. He is currently a visiting research fellow in the Science, Technology & Society Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. For his dissertation, Nicolas investigates shifts in the meaning of "connectivity" in digital infrastructure projects, focusing on smart urban and mobility initiatives in Chinese-global contexts. He holds degrees in environmental engineering and management from the Technical University of Munich, and has received scholarships through both the ERP and China programs of the German National Academic Foundation.

Lou Lennad

Lou Lennad is a PhD student in Science, Technology and Policy studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her current research focuses on the contemporary fabric of public policy regarding human genetics and neurotechnology. She holds an MSc in STS from University College London, and three bachelor’s degrees in Political Science, Genetics, and Law.

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.

Andy Murray

Andy Murray is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Global Observatory for Genome Editing (https://global-observatory.org) at the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His dissertation research consisted of an ethnography of the Open Insulin Project, a community laboratory-based effort to produce affordable insulin. His research interests include how biotechnology and biomedicine are leveraged as ways of doing ethics, politics, and social reform. He has a special interest in social science perspectives and methods, particularly ethnography, as interventions in technoscientific practice. The worlds in which he is interested include personalized and precision medicine, DNA and RNA therapeutics, synthetic biology, and community bio and biohacking.

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 student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Program on Science, Technology and Society. She is interested in thinking closely about the politics of narratives of “progress” in relation to institutions of knowledge production. In particular, her dissertation will focus on how the introduction of scientific methods in theoretical and applied Economics has shaped discourse on "development" and explore contestations on the ground.

Tadeusz Rudek

Tadeusz Rudek is a Ph.D. student at Jagiellonian University in Kraków - Poland. His research interests are gathered around the issues of public reason, sociotechnical imaginaries, civic epistemologies and bioconstitutionalism. He works in the fields of STS studies, sociology of energy, and climate adaptation policies. He is also a research assistant at the EU-funded Horizon2020 projects: Energy Shifts, Comets and Vax-Trust. Tadeusz is a P.I. of the project  “Journey to the West? Sociotechnical Imaginaries of the energy transition in China and Taiwan,” which comprises a comparative analysis of the influence of imaginaries on energy transition policies in both regions.

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.

Marlise Schneider

Marlise Schneider is a visiting research fellow with the Program for Science, Technology, and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Science Technology Studies at the Department of Science, Technology and Society at the Technical University of Munich. As part of the Regional Innovation Cultures team, Marlise studies regional innovation policy, with a focus on struggling and left behind areas. Her current research explores semiconductor R&D as regional development policy in both the United States and Europe. She is interested in understanding how the socio-technical imaginaries of policymakers and community members align- or not – and how that impacts the future building of a region. Marlise earned both an associate’s and bachelor’s degree in Advertising & Marketing Communications from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She holds an MS in Consumer Science from the Technical University of Munich, where was a Writing Fellow at the English Writing Center and Research Assistant at the Munich Center for Technology in Society. Her previous experience outside of academia includes work at the Clinton Global Initiative and on the Hillary for America campaign.

Hilton Simmet

Hilton Simmet is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy and a Research Associate with the STS Program at Harvard Kennedy School. In 2021-22 he was a graduate fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. For the 2022-23 academic year he has been awarded a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard for study in France and India.

Shira Zilberstein

Shira Zilberstein is a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University and a fellow in the Science and Technology Studies program. Her research focuses on cultural sociology, science and technology studies and organizations, as well as theory and methods. She is interested in the production, interpretation and evaluation of ideas and the dynamics between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge in institutional and technical settings. Her dissertation focuses on applied interdisciplinary research collaborations in the field of artificial intelligence. The project studies the ways in which ethics is practiced through and structured by organizational incentives and decision-making processes that define and seek to address social needs.