Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she founded and directs the STS Program. Her research has fundamentally shaped how we think about the intersections of science, technology, policy, and law in the modern world. Before coming to Harvard, Sheila founded and chaired the STS Department at Cornell University. In 2022, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in recognition of her pioneering contributions to the social sciences and humanities, particularly in advancing the field of STS. Born in Kolkata, India, Sheila moved to the U.S. in 1956. She holds an A.B. in mathematics from Radcliffe College, a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, Jay Jasanoff, Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics at Harvard. Their son and daughter are professors at MIT and Harvard, respectively.

Makoto Takahashi
Executive Director

Makoto Takahashi is the McQuillan Institute’s inaugural Executive Director. His work is centrally concerned with crises of trust in experts. Before joining the Institute, Makoto was Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary STS at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he curated and edited Picturing the Invisible, which won the 2022 Ziman Award and was shortlisted for the 2026 D&AD Award. Born in Japan, Makoto moved to the UK shortly after the Kobe Earthquake. He holds a BA, MPhil, and PhD in Geography from Cambridge University, and was a Fulbright-Lloyds Fellow at Harvard. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and won the American Association of Geographers’ 2022 Jacques May Thesis Prize. His writing has appeared in publications such as Social Studies of Science, GeoHumanities, and the Financial Times, and his work has been featured in outlets such as the Washington Post, Arte TV, New Statesman, and the British Journal of Photography. He is currently working on his first monograph (The Improvised Expert: Performing Authority in Fukushima).