Alumni

Alistair Sponsel is Historian of the Life Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a lecturer in history at Tufts University. He was managing director of the Observatory from its inception in 2020 until September 2021.

His research interests include the history of marine science, the history of Pacific islands and islanders, and the emergence of Cambridge, UK as a center for biotechnology research. He is the author of Darwin’s Evolving Identity (Chicago, 2018) and an associate editor of two volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin.

Sponsel received his Ph.D. in history of science from Princeton University and he was a member of the history faculty at Vanderbilt University from 2012 to 2018. He has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.For contact information and more, click here.

Matthew Sample is Professor for Responsible Research and Innovation at Leibniz University Hannover (Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences). He was the Observatory’s postdoctoral fellow in 2020-21. A philosopher of science and technology, he studies the interactions between ethical and epistemic ideals, emerging technologies, and democratic governance.

Matthew received his PhD (2016) in Philosophy from the University of Washington. Before joining LUH, Matthew was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute/McGill University (2016-2020) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Program on Science, Technology and Society in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2020-2021).

Matthew’s previous and ongoing research has included projects on the ethics and politics of neural technology, the role of academic neuroethics in society, value-sensitive epistemologies of science, and most recently responsible innovation in bioengineering practice.

Andy Murray is a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

His research interests include how biotechnology and biomedicine are leveraged as ways of doing ethics, politics, and social reform. He has a special interest in social science perspectives and methods, particularly ethnography, as interventions in technoscientific practice. The worlds in which he is interested include personalized and precision medicine, DNA and RNA therapeutics, synthetic biology, and community bio and biohacking.

He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His dissertation research consisted of an ethnography of the Open Insulin Project, a community laboratory-based effort to produce affordable insulin. He also holds an MA from UC Santa Cruz and a BA from Ursinus College.

Alberto Aparicio is a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

His research interests include the governance of biotechnology and societal responses to shifting meanings and attitudes about life in contemporary bioscience, as well as the framing and social relevance of technoscience.

Aparicio received his PhD in Science and Technology Studies from University College London in 2019, where he studied the construction of safety in synthetic biology by scientists as responsible governance; he finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Colombia’s Instituto Alexander von Humboldt before joining the Global Observatory. He has held various policy and management roles, in academic, consultancy and government institutions.