Current STS Graduate Students

Audrey Baker                  [email protected]

Audrey's research interests center on emerging sociotechnical food regimes, including how institutional, political, technological and ecological structures mediate emerging food production strategies such as digital and cellular agriculture, how these impact and may be influenced by food sovereignty movements at different scales, which experts get to define a healthy, sustainable, just food system, and how different actors in these spaces conceptualize the roles of nature and land. Audrey is an employee degree PhD student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies who is also on staff and an instructor with Cornell’s Master of Public Health Program.

Amy investigates how computational systems and practices change time-honored forms of craftwork. Her ethnographic field research focuses on a trio of case studies; the fine art furniture studio adopting digital fabrication technologies, the operating room introducing robotic surgical procedures, and the luthier’s workshop combining both empirical and data-driven techniques in contemporary violinmaking. Together these cases reveal emergent forms of artisanal practice, reconfigurations to teamwork and collaboration, and unique and interdisciplinary pathways for transmitting knowledge relevant to larger audiences interested in human-computer interaction and science and technology studies.

Amanda Domingues 
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Amanda's work examines how researchers who work with ancient human remains have mobilized ethical principles and practices in their engagements with communities, a practice that has gained increasing importance in collaborative research today. Her work constructs a critical understanding of scientific practices that investigate the past and illuminates the various ways in which researchers are currently navigating a world where science is done through the engagement of a plurality of knowledges.

Amanda is also an undergraduate and graduate tutor with Cornell's Knight Institute and a regular collaborator in pedagogical projects that encourage feminist and radical teaching practices.

Kathrine Gilman

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Kathrine is interested in the intersection of environmental science, history, and Indigenous studies. She is particularly interested in the transfer of environmental knowledge between Haudenosaunee people and settlers and how that knowledge has evolved as Haudenosaunee people have been forcibly removed from their homelands, as they return to them, and how colonizers remaining in the area co-opted, discarded, or modified Native knowledges of the land. She is also curious how knowledges of the land have been preserved, written, and recorded and how that has impacted our current understanding of the land.

Kathrine has a B.A. in History from West Virginia University and an MAT in secondary education from Boston University. She taught high school for several years before coming to Cornell.

Bianca Grier

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Becca's research considers how agricultural biotechnologists are deliberate, ethical actors navigating both a complex regulatory structure and increasing public concern about genetic engineering. Specifically, she focuses on academic scientists at land-grant institutions (like Cornell), and is using tools from STS to imagine a more reflective type of public engagement around technology development.

Jiuheng He
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Jiuheng's research is concerned with the encounter of human's expertise with Artificial Intelligence. The dissertation project aims to study the interactions between humans and AI with the case of AlphaGo and Go community, where human’s expertise is challenged by machine learning’s capability. This research will provide insights on governance and interpretability of machine learning algorithms at the intersection of the human world and the rapidly-changing AI world. Additional research interests include social construction of technology, history of artificial intelligence and critical data studies. 

Wanheng is a Ph.D. candidate in Science and Technology Studies with a minor in Media Studies. His research lies at the intersection of social studies of science, medicine, and technology; critical data/algorithm studies; and public engagement with science. His dissertation examines the cultivation of credible machine learning (ML) algorithms in expert practices, with an empirical focus on image-based diagnostics within the Chinese medical artificial intelligence (AI) industry. His most recent work is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning and Public Understanding of Science.

Hai Ri Jeon

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Yuxin Jia

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Yuxin’s current research focuses on labor and environmental issues in computing infrastructures. She’s curious about people’s alternative technological solutions and imaginaries beyond designers’ intentions. She also has a broad interest in anthropology, human-computer interaction, and media studies. 

Barkha's dissertation is tentatively titled, "Understanding Processing: Food and Technoscience in India". One solution to the problem of food wastage in India could be processing, the thesis analyzes how processing technologies are shaping the food system. Using the case of Mega Food Parks, it illuminates interactions between food processing technologies, infrastructures and national policy design in changing the agri-food sector.

Keywords: Sociology of technology; economic sociology; market sociology; food studies; food quality; Indian food system; food processing technologies.

Faridah's work on the history of "Biblical archeology" explores how, when, and why late-Victorian archaeologists justified their scholarship in religious terms. Her areas of interest include: relationships between religion, science, and empire; race, gender, class, and religion in the production of new knowledge; and public understandings of science in museums and the press.

Lissette Lorenz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies with a background in environmental studies, theater, and dance. They explore the environ/mental health challenges that more-than-human communities face in our current age of planetary crises. Drawing from critical social theories across the humanities and social sciences, Lissette employs transdisciplinary and experimental qualitative methods found in activist scholarship to collectively address Earthly un/worlding. Their writing on community-based theater for environmental justice can be found in the Routledge Handbook for Art, Science, and Technology Studies and in JCOM: Journal of Science Communication. Their research is funded in part by the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation. For more information, visit their website: https://lissettelorenz.com/. 

Jason Ludwig is a PhD candidate in Science & Technology Studies. His dissertation examines how government officials, computer experts, and activists sought to advance racial equality through computing in the postwar United States. His interests span histories of race science, surveillance, disaster studies, and the radical politics of science and technology.

Vishal Nyayapathi 
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Vishal is interested in how agroforestry management works on the ground in contemporary Sri Lanka. This project speaks to discussions in the environmental humanities, postcolonial science studies and South Asian area studies. They received a B.A. in Anthropology from The George Washington University.

Donny is interested in how internet infrastructures construct and reshape understandings of place, nature, and the environment. His dissertation research explores emerging issues associated with low-earth-orbit satellite internet infrastructure, examining how stakeholders including telecom operators, astronomers, legal bodies, and activists mobilize overlapping and conflicting visions of nature to argue for varying levels of environmental protection for outer space.

Dawn Warfield
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Elexis Williams
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Elexis Trinity is a PhD student in the field of Science and Technology Studies with a background in area studies, human and nonhuman rights. While their master’s research focused on Russian water policy during the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, their current research interests mobilize around histories of science, environmental history/STS and knowledge-making, with a particular focus on the sea in human history, the making of underwater laboratories, and the spatialization of the oceans and seas in scientific practice, ecotourism, and conservation. 

Currently reading: anything about oceanography, marine archeology, or seascape epistemologies.
 

Alena Zhang
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Yue Zhao is a PhD Candidate in Science and Technology Studies. Her dissertation project investigates the intersection of medical history and history of information technology in modern China. She is interested in examining technical embodiment through feminist STS perspectives. She received her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. View Yue's website.