Ellen Bales is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. She received her Ph.D. from the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley where her major field was history of science. She is currently working on a project on the Supreme Court’s 1993 Daubert decision and its subsequent impact on science and law.

Ellen’s dissertation was on the history of risk assessment in the United States, and used case studies on exposures to radon in uranium mines in the 1950s and 1960s and in suburban homes in the 1980s to explore shifts in how risk was conceptualized, managed, and articulated from the mid- to the late 20th century.

Ellen’s general research interests are U.S. science during the Cold War, risk and risk assessment in 20th-century America, regulatory science in the U.S., the nuclear establishment in the U.S., science and law, and environmental history.