Aishani Aatresh is a PhD student in Public Policy and Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School. Her work concerns the ways in which ideas of the public good are intertwined with how institutions frame and address problems of uncertainty across national boundaries. 

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. Her PhD dissertation considers how and with what consequences non-state actors come to play state-like roles, focusing on the transnational activities of philanthropies associated with U.S. technology companies in domains such as public health, environmental change, and digital development.

As an undergraduate, Aishani also was a researcher in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and worked as a journalist and computational immunologist in South San Francisco’s synthetic biology industry. 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.