Sheila Jasanoff

Sheila Jasanoff is the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where she founded the Program on Science, Technology, and Society. Trained in mathematics at Harvard, linguistics at the University of Bonn, and law at Harvard Law School, she developed the foundational concepts that govern how societies make decisions about technologies they do not fully understand. Her framework insists that legitimacy requires participation — that technical competence alone produces democratically inadequate decisions — and that the people most affected by a technology must have voice in its governance. Her major works include The Fifth Branch (1990), Designs on Nature (2005), and The Ethics of Invention (2016). Recipient of the Bernal Prize and regarded as one of the most influential thinkers on democratic governance of technology, her concepts have become essential to understanding why AI governance is not merely a technical problem but a constitutional question about who decides the future.