Lee Vinsel holds a joint appointment as a post-doctoral fellow with the Program on Science, Technology, & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. Lee’s central interest lies in how societies use various tools – from formal regulations to informal rules – to mitigate technological “risks.” He has on-going projects examining the history of auto regulation, the history of energy systems and energy statistics (the estimating, predicting, and modeling of present and future energy supplies), and the ethics of personal, or consumer, communications technologies.

His dissertation – completed at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 – examined federal regulation of the automobile in the United States from the mid-1960s to the present. His work focuses on how federal bureaucrats used organizational capabilities – including scientific and technical experts – to achieve strategic goals in regulating firms.

At Carnegie Mellon, he also worked with engineers, economists, and scientists in an interdisciplinary group, the Climate Decision Making Center (CDMC). The CDMC built decision tools for policy makers and was one of the National Science Foundation’s Collaborative Groups on Decision Making Under Uncertainty.