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 inaugural Executive Director at the McQuillan Institute. His work is centrally concerned with environmental disasters and how expert authority is performed in conditions of low public trust. His current book project — The Improvised Expert — and documentary project — Lions of Yamakiya (co-directed with Ross Harrison) — both address the contested legacies of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Before joining the Institute, Makoto was Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary STS at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He curated the travelling exhibition Picturing the Invisible (winner, 2022 Ziman Award) and published an edited volume of the same name with Fw:Books (shortlisted, 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. His work has been published in journals such as Social Studies of Science, GeoHumanities, and Science and Technology Studies, and he has written for news outlets and magazines such as the Financial Times, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Conversation, and The Diplomat.

T.J. Foley
Assistant Director

T.J. Foley is the Assistant Director of the McQuillan Institute and a Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School. His research examines the political, economic, and constitutional implications of emerging technologies, using archival and ethnographic methods to study how digital technologies reshape the rights and entitlements of democratic governance. His current book project entitled Watchdogs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Trust-Busters, is under contract with the University Press of Kansas (co-authored with Sascha Meinrath). Watchdogs argues that antitrust law was always a constitutional project—placing a limit on private power—until a century-long shift toward “expert” economic knowledge narrowed it into a narrow, price-focused technical exercise, clearing the way for the corporate concentration of today’s tech giants. His work has appeared in Energy Research & Social Science and the American Journal of Legal History. T.J. holds an AB from Harvard College in Social Studies, where his thesis examined the political status of large technology companies.