Sheila Jasanoff Full Biography

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SHEILA JASANOFF is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She holds a secondary appointment at the Harvard School of Public Health and is affiliated with the Department of the History of Science. Previously, she was Professor of Science Policy and Law at Cornell University and the founding chair of Cornell’s Department of Science and Technology Studies.

Jasanoff's longstanding research interests center on the interactions of law, science, and politics in democratic societies. Specific areas of work include science and the law; comparative politics of environmental regulation and risk management; and the political implications of scientific and technological change. She has written more than 80 articles and book chapters on these topics and has authored and edited numerous books, including Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States (1985; with R. Brickman and T. Ilgen), Risk Management and Political Culture (1985), The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (1990), Learning from Disaster: Risk Management After Bhopal (edited; 1994). Jasanoff is a co editor of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (1995). Her book Science at the Bar: Law, Science and Technology in America (1995) received the Don K. Price award of the American Political Science Association, Section on Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics, for the best book on science and politics (1998). It has been translated into Italian.

Her most recent publications include two edited volumes: States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (2004) and (with Marybeth Martello) Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (2004). Her latest book, a comparative study of the politics of biotechnology in Britain, Germany and the United States, entitled Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2005.

Jasanoff has been a visiting professor at Yale University (1990 91), Boston University School of Law (1993), Harvard University (1995), and Kyoto University (1999), as well as a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College and the Centre for Socio Legal Studies, Oxford University (1996, 1986). She was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2001-2002 and the Karl W. Deutsch Guest Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin in 2004. In 1996, she was a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center. In fall 2005, she will be the Leverhulme Visiting Professor in geography and history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge (UK). She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recipient of the John Desmond Bernal award of the Society for Social Studies of Science (2004) and the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Society for Risk Analysis (1992).

Jasanoff has held numerous offices in the Society for Social Studies of Science, including past President (1999-2001). She was a member of the AAAS ABA National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists (1985 91) and the Board of Directors of AAAS (1996 2000). Currently, she is a member of the Kuratorium of the University of Bielefeld, the International Jury for the Austrian START-Wittgenstein award, and the UK’s Science in Society funding program. She has served on advisory committees and panels of the US National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. She is an editorial adviser to numerous journals and book series, including Environmental Science and Technology, Risk Analysis, Science Communication, Social Studies of Science, and Science, Technology, and Human Values. She was Section Editor for Science and Technology Studies of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. She has been a consultant to a many science policy organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Office of Technology Assessment, the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Medicine, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory.

Jasanoff holds an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard College (1964), an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Bonn, Germany (1966), a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University (1973), and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1976). She was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1977. From 1976 to 1978 she was an associate with Bracken, Selig and Baram, an environmental law firm in Boston. She was employed at Cornell University from 1978 to 1998.