Geneva Smith is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Science, Technology and Society Program and a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology with a PhD Fellowship from the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico. Her interests lie in improving policy-making and outcomes through closer attention to the social dimensions of public policy. While at Harvard, Geneva will ethnographically study the co-production of agricultural biotechnology and economic justice in Argentina.

In her doctoral research, Geneva draws upon her multi-disciplinary graduate training and professional experience as a policy researcher to explore how policies and policy-makers in the Global South engage in scientific controversy through the promotion of GMOs. She aims to understand the transnational flow of ideas about GMOs, how policy promotes or disables the use of scientific fact, and how GMOs are put to political use.

Geneva earned a B.A. in French Studies from Smith College in 2004 and a M.A. in Global Policy Studies specializing in Security, Law, and Diplomacy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Geneva left a career in the arts after having worked as a Senior Art Consultant for Axelle Fine Arts and apprenticing with an old master’s painting conservator at Heidelberg Conservation to pursue her graduate training. Throughout graduate school, she has served as a researcher on social sector initiatives with the ActionSmith Network, Family Independence Initiative, and Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, and international policy research projects for the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, USAID and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.