Leadership

Sheila Jasanoff (Director) is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in her field, she has authored more than 130 articles and chapters and is author or editor of more than 15 books, including The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, Designs on Nature, and The Ethics of Invention. 

Her work explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies. She founded and directs the STS Program at Harvard; previously, she was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell. She has held visiting appointments at leading universities in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US. Jasanoff served on the AAAS Board of Directors and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the University of Ghent Sarton Chair, an Ehrenkreuz from the Government of Austria, and foreign membership in the British Academy and Royal Danish Academy. 

She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Twente and Liège.

J. Benjamin Hurlbut (Director) is Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

He is trained in science and technology studies (STS) with a focus on the history of the modern biomedical and life sciences, and his research lies at the intersection of STS, bioethics and political theory. He studies the changing relationships between science, politics and law in the governance of biomedical research and innovation, examining the interplay of science and technology with democracy, religious and moral pluralism, and public reason. He is the author of Experiments in Democracy: Human Embryo Research and the Politics of Bioethics (Columbia University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

He holds an A.B. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Krishanu Saha (Director) is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Prior to his arrival in Madison, Dr. Saha studied chemical engineering and biotechnology at Cornell University, University of Cambridge, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2007 he became a Society in Science: Branco-Weiss fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT and in the Science and Technology Studies program at Harvard. At UW-Madison, major thrusts of his lab involve gene editing and cell engineering of human cells found in the retina, central nervous system, liver, and blood.

He is a member of the National Academies’ Forum on Regenerative Medicine, a co-lead for the T cell testbed within the National Science Foundation’s Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) and a Co-Chair of the Steering Committee of the National Institutes for Health’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) Consortium.

Henry is a Research Associate with the Global Observatory for Genome Editing and a Fellow in the STS program. Henry holds an A.B. from Harvard College where he studied Social Studies with a Secondary Field in Computer Science before graduating in 2023.

In the STS Program and the Observatory, his research has focused on the politics of datafication and memory, with a particular focus on the right to be forgotten and the remaking of state sovereignty in technological societies. Henry hopes to attend law school in the future upon completion of the Observatory project.

Dan Affsprung is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at Arizona State University. He is a Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School and a research assistant for the Global Observatory for Genome Editing. Dan’s research examines the ways scientific and technical expertise are used to support and regulate social and political functioning by defining conditions that enable individuals to act with autonomy and produce collective benefit. He studies the history of Cold War social and interdisciplinary science and the regulation of emerging technology.

At Arizona State University, Dan worked with the Digital Health and Racial Justice Lab and the Beyond Secularization Project. He holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Dartmouth College and a bachelor’s in English Literature from SUNY New Paltz.