Aishani Aatresh is a PhD student in Public Policy and Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research about science, technology and global order considers how ideas of the public good are intertwined with the knowledge that institutions produce to address uncertainty across scales.

Aishani’s undergraduate and master’s projects addressed how the technologies that organizations devise in the name of pandemic preparedness reflect different theories of how to govern global problems, involving the authority to define and responsibility to address risk and inequity. This work analyzed 21st-century global public health initiatives such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and efforts in India and Senegal to produce vaccines for regional use. For the PhD, she hopes to more broadly study the constitutive role of science and technology in global politics, particularly through the emergence of health and education-related philanthropies associated with digital technology companies.

As an undergraduate, Aishani also worked with the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the synthetic biology industry in South San Francisco, California. She holds an AB from Harvard College in Complex Biosocial Systems, an independently designed degree, and an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.