Current Fellows

Aishani Aatresh

Aishani Aatresh is an undergraduate at Harvard College and a Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society. She is pursuing a degree of her own design, coined Complex Biosocial Systems, which explores how uncertainty is conceptualized and acted upon vis-a-vis changing biological and sociopolitical landscapes.

Rodrigo Araiza Bravo

Rodrigo is a Physics Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University and is simultaneously pursuing a secondary-field concentration at Harvard STS. Rodrigo's physics research uses classical optimization techniques to improve the computational capabilities of near-term, intermediate-scale analog quantum computers. From the moment he joined Harvard, he became heavily involved in organizing with the Harvard Graduate Student Union. His passion for formulating organizational change, together with his research into quantum computation, led him to start thinking about ways to meaningfully attend to the societal aspects of his field. Rodrigo joined the Harvard STS program in January of 2022 and is currently conducting research on the political and geopolitical aspects of quantum technologies' funding, workforce development, and instituted research directions in the US. He recently completed an internship at IBM Quantum, working on Responsible Quantum Computing research. Rodrigo is a co-founder of the Quantum Ethics Project, an organization supporting young researchers who want to develop a richer scientific scholarship by incorporating ethical questions into their training. He is also a co-president of the GSAS Quantum Science and Society student group aiming to open up spaces for interdisciplinary conversations around quantum and society at Harvard University.

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.

Keaton Boyle

Keaton Boyle is a PhD student in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School on the Science, Technology, and Policy Studies track. He is interested in using the tools and sensibilities of STS to explore interactions between digital technology and legal theory, especially at points where the law draws boundaries between political and economic spheres. Before starting his PhD, Keaton was a Technology Fellow in the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Competition, and worked as software engineer for three years. He has also worked and volunteered on political campaigns and interned in the U.S. House of Representatives. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.

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.

Sushant Kumar

Sushant Kumar is a Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy at Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Boston. His doctoral research examines the emergence and persistence of the idea of the small family and two-child norms in Indian population policy making and the legitimization of these ideas through scientific knowledge-making. He has conducted archival analysis across India and the U.S and used semi-structured interviews with stakeholders to answer his dissertation questions. His work sits at the intersection of policy studies, political communication and STS to understand discursive contestations and formation of dominant ideas. He holds a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering and an M.Tech in Information Communication Technology from IIT Delhi.

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 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.

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.

Lucía Ortiz de Zárate Alcarazo

Lucía Ortiz de Zárate Alcarazo is a Ph.D. Candidate in AI Ethics and Governance at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and an associate researcher at the Fine Arts Circle of Madrid. She is a visiting Fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society. She holds two master’s degrees, one in Astrophysics and another in Democracy and Government. She also has two bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Philosophy. In 2021 she was included in the “35 under 35” list of Future Leaders in Algorithmic Governance and Artificial Intelligence by the CIDOB-Santander Forum.

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 Public Policy program and affiliated with Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS). Her doctoral work studies the moral politics of digital capitalism in the context of India, where she studies the adoption of digital biometrics and payment systems by street vendors. She also works comparatively to think about how legal data regulation regimes are constructed and legitimized across the US, EU and China. Apart from digitization, Pariroo is also writes about the politics of evidence in Harvard affirmative action lawsuit and music as a technology of social movements.

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 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.