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Sheila Jasanoff

Professor of Science and Public Policy

Faculty Affiliate, Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program

Contact:
Telephone: (617) 495-7902
Fax: (617) 495-8963
Email: sheila_jasanoff@harvard.edu

Experience

Sheila Jasanoff is Professor of Science and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She also has a joint appointment with 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 and founding chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University.

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 courts; environmental regulation and risk management; comparative public policy; social studies of science and technology; and science and technology policy. She has published more than 60 articles and book chapters on these topics and has authored or edited several 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).

Jasanoff has held visiting professorships at Yale University (1990-91), Boston University School of Law (1993), Harvard University (1995), and Kyoto University (1999). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University (1996, 1986). In 1996, she was a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recipient (1992) of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Society for Risk Analysis.

Jasanoff has held several offices, including President Elect (1998), in the Society for Social Studies of Science. She has served on numerous advisory committees and panels of the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. She is a past member of the AAAS-ABA National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists (1985-91) and a member of the Board of Directors of AAAS (1996-2000). She is an editorial adviser to several journals and book series, including Environmental Science and Technology, Risk Analysis, Science Communication, Social Studies of Science, and Science, Technology, and Human Values; she is section editor for Science and Technology Studies of the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. She has been a consultant to a number of 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.