Steven Yearley

Steven Yearley
Professor Steven Yearley
Born	1956 (1956) Walthamstow, North East London, UK
Died	(1956-09-06) 6 September 1956 (age 60)
Occupation	Sociologist
Known for	ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum

Steve Yearley (born 6 September 1956), is a British sociologist, Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge at the University of Edinburgh, a post he has held since 2005. He is seconded from the sociology unit to be Director of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, more often known as the Genomics Forum. He has been designated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Yearley first studied natural sciences and then social and political sciences at Cambridge University. He completed a PhD in sociology, supervised by Michael Mulkay, at the University of York from 1978 to 1981. Due to the scarcity of sociology jobs in the UK in the early 1980s, Yearley had a couple of short-term positions before he got a lectureship in sociology at Queen's University Belfast in 1983. It was in Belfast that he began to concentrate on environmental issues and in the late 1980s and early 1990s he was closely associated with Friends of the Earth, the Ulster Wildlife Trust and Northern Ireland Environment Link.

He became the first Professor of Sociology at the University of Ulster in 1992, returning to Queen’s for a short stint as Professor there in 1994, and then moving to the sociology professorship at the University of York in 1995. He worked in York from 1995 to 2005, spending his last six years there as Head of Department; in York he worked closely with colleagues in the . Yearley has also spent periods as Visiting Professor in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, at the Technical University of Denmark and at the University of Melbourne.