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 non-governmental actors come to undertake the work of governments and reshape democratic practices through the development of science and technology, especially in the domain of health.

Aishani is broadly interested in how ideas of the public good are intertwined with the knowledge that governing institutions produce and mobilize to address uncertainty across scales. Her dissertation project focuses on philanthropies that have emerged from U.S.-based digital technology companies. She is studying how they identify and tackle health problems in formerly colonized countries, establish the authority to do so, and advance distinct imaginaries of progress, public well-being, and political legitimacy in the process.

This project builds on her undergraduate and master’s research about the different social theories of risk, inequity, and responsibility across national boundaries that animate how organizations devise and legitimate technoscientific solutions in the name of pandemic preparedness. That work analyzed 21st-century global health initiatives such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and efforts in India and Senegal to produce vaccines for regional use.

As an undergraduate, Aishani was also 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 studied on a Rhodes Scholarship.