Science and Technology Studies

Atsushi Akera

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — akeraa

Name:	Atsushi Akera
Title:	Associate Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://www.rpi.edu~akeraa/

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Scholarly Works:

Calculating a Natural World Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research Atsushi Akera

Recognitions:

Undergraduate Curriculum Innovation Grant. AY 2001-2002. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education
IEEE Postdoctoral Fellowship. AY 1999-2000. IEEE History Center Fellowship in Electrical History. [Converted to a research grant while a faculty at RPI.]

Steve Breyman

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — breyms

Name:	Steve Breyman
Title:	Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://www.rpi.edu/~breyms/

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Education Ph.D. California-Santa Barbara

Nancy Campbell

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — campbn2

Name:	Nancy Campbell
Title:	Associate Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
Website:	http://www.sts.rpi.edu/pl/faculty/nancy-campbell

Bio Nancy D. Campbell is a professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Her most recent book is a visual history of the federal drug treatment hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, titled The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2008, co-authored with JP Olsen and Luke Walden). Her book-length scholarly history of the science conducted by the Addiction Research Center (now the intramural research program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse) is titled Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (University of Michigan Press, 2007). Her first book was Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2000). With Joseph Spillane she created the Oral History of Substance Abuse Research Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and the University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center, which can be found at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/substance.abuse.history/home. In 2009 she received the Media Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence. Campbell was awarded her doctoral degree in 1995 from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her dissertation was titled, “Cold War Compulsions: U.S. Drug Policy, Science, and Culture.”

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Linnda Caporael

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — caporl

Name:	Linnda Caporael
Title:	Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://www.rpi.edu/~caporl/

Bio Linnda R. Caporael is a Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She researches biology from a cultural perspective and culture from a biological perspective. She has written on a variety of topics including cooperation, group coordination, social identity, and the attribution of human characteristics to animals and machines. Her most recent interests are in design research and theory, from both an evolutionary and Science and Technology Studies perspective. In addition to teaching courses in human evolution and culture and cognition, she also teaches in the Interdisciplinary Programs in Design and Innovation (PDI) and serves on its Steering Committee. Professor Caporael studied human ethology as a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Child Development, University of London. She also has been a Visiting Scientist in the departments of Invertebrate Biology and Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and a Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg, Austria. She is an associate editor for Biological Theory: Integrating Development, Evolution, and Cognition, on the editorial board of Psychological Review, and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences (APS). Linnda Caporael was awarded a five-year Ford Foundation Fellowship for graduate study and received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Education Ph.D. California - Santa Barbara

Scholarly Works:

Caporael, L. R. (2008). Groups and the Evolution of Good Stories and Good Choices. In J. I. Krueger (Ed.), Rationality and Social Responsibility: Essays in Honor of Robyn Mason Dawes (pp. 275-319). Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Caporael, L. R. (2007). Evolutionary theory for social and cultural psychology. In E. T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp.3-18). New York: Guildford Press.

Ron Eglash

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — eglash

Name:	Ron Eglash
Title:	Associate Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://homepages.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.htm

Bio My interests are at the intersection between issues of culture (anthropology of race, class and gender; low-income community development; minority student education) and technoscience (complexity theory, cybernetics, design, nanotechnology).

Much of my work approaches this intersection through cultually situated math and science education. Also of interest is the appropriation of science and technology by under-served groups. An important recent project is my NSF GK-12 grant, Triple Helix: a collaboration between graduate research faculty and their students, K-12 teachers and students, and community development mentors.

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Education B.S. in Cybernetics, M.S. in Systems Engineering,PhD in History of Consciousness,University of California

Kim Fortun

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — fortuk

Name:	Kim Fortun
Title:	Associate Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://www.fortuns.org/?page_id=3

Bio Kim Fortun received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 1993 and is author of Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago 2001). She co-edits (with Mike Fortun) Cultural Anthropology (culanth.org), the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Fortun's research and teaching focus on environmental health problems, and on developing ethnography as a way to understand and engage the complexities of the contemporary world. Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to, and reduce, vulnerability to environmental risk and disaster.

Fortun's undergraduate teaching contributes to our new Sustainability Studies Program, and to the development of student capacity for independent research. Her graduate teaching focuses on research design and methods, on cultural analysis of science and technology, and on critical theories of language, knowledge and communication.

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Education Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology Rice University

Scholarly Works:

2009: Major Works in Cultural Anthropology, Vol 1-4: Moorings, Modernities, Emergence, Engagements. Sage (co-edited with Mike Fortun). essays 2009: "Environmental Right-To-Know and the Transmutations of Law," Catastrophe: Law, Politics and the Humanitarian Impulse edited by Austin Sarat. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Mike Fortun

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — fortum

Name:	Mike Fortun
Title:	Associate Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://www.rpi.edu/dept/sts/faculty/FortunM/MFortun_biography.html

Bio Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Insititute, Troy, New York, USA. He is co-editor (with Kim Fortun) of Cultural Anthropology, the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. A historian of the life sciences, his current research focuses on the contemporary science, culture, and political economy of genomics. His work in the life sciences has covered the policy, scientific, and social history of the Human Genome Project in the U.S., the history of biotechnology, and the growth of commercial genomics and bioinformatics in the speculative economies of the 1990s. His most recent work is Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press 2008), an ethnographic account of deCODE Genetics in Iceland. His other recent ethnographic work on toxicogenomics, and on the use of race variables in genetics research on complex conditions (nicotine use and asthma), is based in ongoing involvement with "transdisciplinary" groups of geneticists, physicians, historians, legal and policy scholars, and anthropologists centered at the Insitutute for Health Care Research at Georgetown University and the Institute for Health Policy at Harvard University.

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Education Ph.D. 1993 Harvard University, History of Science B.A. 1982 Hampshire College

Scholarly Works:

PUBLICATIONS:

Promising Genomics: Iceland and DeCODE Genetics In a World of Speculation. University of California Press, September 2008.

Major Works in Cultural Anthropology (4 vols.). 2009. Edited with Kim Fortun. London: Sage.

"Genes In Our kNot." 2009. Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era, Paul and Margaret Lock (eds.). London: Routledge.

"For An Ethics of Promising, Or, A Few Kind Words About James Watson." New Genetics and Society 24/2:157-173. August 2005.

"Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology" (with Kim Fortun), American Anthropologist 107(1):43-54. March 2005.

"The Use of Race Variables in Genetic Studies of Complex Traits and the Goal of Reducing Health Disparities" (with Evelynn Hammonds, Patricia King, Caryn Lerman, Rayna Rapp, Alexandra Shields, and Patrick Sullivan), American Psychologist 60 (1):77-103. January 2005.

"Celera Genomics: The Race for the Human Genome Sequence." Encyclopedia of Human Genetics. London: Macmillan, 2003. (http://www.naturereference.com/ehg/ehg.htm)

Abby J. Kinchy

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — kincha

Name:	Abby J. Kinchy
Title:	Assistant Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://abbykinchy.weebly.com/

Bio Abby Kinchy joined the STS Department in 2007, after receiving a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a variety of research interests, including: food, agriculture, biotechnology, and rural communities; environmental politics and history; social movements and participatory science; and expertise and democracy. Professor Kinchy teaches courses for the Sustainability Studies minor, including "Environment and Society," "Food, Farms, and Famine," and "A Century of Environmental Thought." She is also a co-instructor for "Product Design and Innovation Studio II," a required course for the Design, Innovation, and Society major. At the graduate level, she teaches "Science, Technology, and Social Movements" and "Concepts in STS." She lives in Troy with her husband, two-year-old son, and two rabbits.

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Signature_Thrust

Energy and the Environment

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Education Ph.D., 2007, Sociology University of Wisconsin-Madison

Linda Layne

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — laynel

Name:	Linda Layne
Title:	Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://www.rpi.edu/~laynel/

Bio Linda L. Layne is the Hale Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

She received her Ph.D. in 1986 in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Princeton University. That work resulted in Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities (Princeton University Press 1994) and a collection on Elections in the Middle East (Westview 1987).

Layne’s research interests changed abruptly in January 1989 when her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage at 13 weeks gestation. Since that time she has used the lens of anthropology to explain why American women are so ill-prepared for miscarriage, stillbirth, or early infant death and why the feminist movement has not fully embraced this important women’s health issue. She has developed a women’s health approach to child-bearing loss through her publications and an 11-part, award-winning television series, “Motherhood Lost: Conversations” co-produced with Heather Bailey at George Mason Television.

Layne is author of Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Perspective on Pregnancy Loss (Routledge 2003); and the Childbearing Loss chapter of the new edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves (2005), and editor of Consuming Motherhood (with Taylor and Wozniak) Rutgers University Press 2004 (Winner of the Council on Anthropology of Reproduction's New Volume Book Prize), and Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture New York University Press 1999 (Winner of the Council on Anthropology of Reproduction's Enduring Influence Book Prize) and Feminist Technology, 2010, University of Illinois Press (with Sharra Vostral and Kate Boyer).

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Education Ph.D. Princeton

Michael Mascarenhas

Sun, 2010-06-13 02:05 — mascam

Name:	Michael Mascarenhas
Title:	Assistant Professor
Department	Science and Technology Studies
School	Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Website:	http://www.sts.rpi.edu/~mascam/MJMs_Personal_Webpage/Home.html

Bio Michael Mascarenhas joined the Science and Technology Studies Department  in 2007. Dr. Masarenhas completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia in 2006, and received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Michigan State University in 2005. His current research examines the relationship between recent environmental governance regimes and their impacts on social relationships and structural hierarchies. In over a dozen publications, he has written on water, wolves, seed-saving, standards, supermarkets, family farms, and forests.

Professor Mascarenhas teaches courses for the undergraduate Sustainability Studies minor, including "Politics of the Global Environment," "Environment and Society," and "Environmental Justice." Professor Mascarenhas also teaches "Inequality in America," (an upper division undergraduate course) and, "Contemporary Social Theory and Trans-nationalism" (graduate course).

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