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.

Her undergraduate research was based in the Program on Science, Technology and Society, where she has been a Fellow since 2021, and the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She broadly tackled questions of contemporary constitutionalism in studying and contributing to infectious disease preparedness and response. Aishani’s senior thesis traces the evolution of three endeavors in trying to achieve pandemic preparedness on a global scale: World Health Organization-led negotiations for a Pandemic Accord; zoonotic surveillance to discover novel viruses in animals before they “spill over” to humans; and vaccine development to address market failures through the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and regionalized manufacturing. It argues that each initiative identifies distinctive forms of uncertainty in the global circulation of information (viral genetic sequences) or products (vaccines) and foregrounds a different register in which states have traditionally exercised and delegated power: international politics, via treaty-making; public health, through research programs; and the economy, with market incentives. The thesis shows in each case how policy designers developed a universalizing way of seeing pandemic threats and vulnerable people while overlooking elements of context and culture, and it reflects on alternative approaches to formulating questions of disease and shared responsibility that might make for a healthier world.

Aishani co-founded and chaired the STS Program’s Undergraduate Fellowship, which brings together students at the College from across departments and fields to learn about the discipline of STS and to think critically about science and technology. She also served as Editor-in-Chief for the Future Humans Anthology in celebration of the Program’s 20th anniversary in 2022.

During and prior to college, Aishani worked with various organizations in ways that contributed significantly to her research interests and methods. She was a Policy and Public Partnerships intern at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations as part of participant observation for her senior thesis, and she developed computational methods for antibody engineering and assisted with government affairs, market diligence, and vaccine clinical trial design for South San Francisco biotech start-ups Distributed Bio and Centivax. Aishani also interned with the Special Pathogens Program under NYC Health+Hospitals, the United States’ largest municipal healthcare delivery system, and wrote extensively for synthetic biology organization SynBioBeta.

Her work has been supported by the Yun Family Research Fellows Fund for Revolutionary Thinking, Harvard Global Health Institute, Herchel Smith Undergraduate Science Research Program, and Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.