Sheila Jasanoff

Sheila Jasanoff
Sheila Jasanoff in 2010
Born	1944 India
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Radcliffe College, University of Bonn, Harvard University
Occupation	American social scientist, science and technology studies
Employer	Cornell University, Harvard University
Spouse(s)	Jay H. Jasanoff
Children	Maya Jasanoff, Alan Jasanoff

Sheila Sen Jasanoff is an Indian American academic and significant contributor to the field of Science and Technology Studies.

Born in India, Jasanoff attended Radcliffe College, where she studied mathematics as an undergraduate, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1964. She then studied linguistics, receiving her M.A. at the University of Bonn (then part of West Germany). She returned to Harvard to complete a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1973, and a J.D. at Harvard Law School in 1976. She practiced environmental law in Boston from 1976 to 1978. She and her husband then accepted positions at Cornell University, where she became a pioneer in the newly emerging field of Science and Technology Studies. In 1998, Jasanoff joined the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University as a professor of public policy. In 2002, she became Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies.

Jasanoff founded and directs the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her research focuses on science and the state in contemporary democratic societies. Her work is relevant to science & technology studies, comparative politics, law and society, political and legal anthropology, and policy analysis. Jasanoff’s research has considerable empirical breadth, spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the European Union, and India, as well as emerging global regimes in areas such as climate and biotechnology.

One line of Jasanoff’s work demonstrates how the political culture of different democratic societies influences how they assess evidence and expertise in policymaking. Her first book (with Brickman and Ilgen), Controlling Chemicals (1985), examines the regulation of toxic substances in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The book showed how the routines of decision making in these countries reflected different conceptions of what counts as evidence and of how expertise should operate in a policy context. In Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (2005), she has shown how different societies employ different modes of public reasoning when making decisions involving science and technology. These differences, which in part reflect distinct "civic epistemologies," are deeply embedded in institutions and shape how policy issues are framed and processed by the bureaucratic machinery of modern states.