Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is also affiliated with the Department of the History of Science, member of the Board of Tutors in Environmental Science and Public Policy, and visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Professor Jasanoff’s longstanding research interests center on the interactions of law, science, and politics in democratic societies. She is particularly concerned with the construction of public reason in various cultural contexts, and with the role of science and technology in globalization. Specific areas of work include science and the courts; environmental regulation and risk management; comparative public policy; social studies of science and technology; and science and technology policy. Her most recent publications include two edited volumes: States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (2004) and (with Marybeth Martello) Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (2004). Her latest book, a comparative study of the politics of biotechnology in Britain, Germany and the United States, entitled Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, was published by Princeton University Press in 2005.

Sara, who works with core Broad Institute member Feng Zhang. focuses on identifying and developing novel strategies for gene editing through the study of non-model organisms. Her current efforts concentrate on the study of programmed genome rearrangement in the ciliated protozoa Oxytricha trifallax. During development this microorganism shatters its genome into hundreds of thousands of pieces, which it must precisely rearrange and reassemble to survive. By understanding how such complex genome architectures can be sustained in nature, she hopes to build a new platform for gene editing in mammalian cells. Before coming to the Broad, Sara completed her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at The University of Chicago. She went on to do her graduate studies at Harvard University, working with Xiaowei Zhuang on the development and application of super-resolution fluorescence imaging to biological systems.

Prof. Kanwisher is a pioneer in the use of functional MRI (fMRI) and other techniques to pinpoint regions of the brain’s cortex that are specific cognitive tasks such as the perception of faces, places, bodies, and words. Kanwisher has written that she is interested in big questions like: “How are objects, faces, and scenes represented in the brain, and (how) do the representations of each of these classes of stimuli differ from each other? How are visual representations affected by attention, awareness, and experience? Which mental processes get their own special patch of cortex, why is it these processes and (apparently) not others, and how do special-purpose bits of brain arise in the first place?”

Kanwisher's findings have made her into a strong “localizationist,” a proponent of the idea that specific high-level cognitive processes are handled by specific brain areas, such as the Fusiform Face Area, a part of the human visual system she named in 1997. Her lab is working to understand (among other things) how these functionally specific areas arise in development, and whether and how they change in adulthood. Kanwisher is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a young researcher she had a side interest in journalism, even taking a summer off from her studies in the 1980s for a reporting trip in war-torn Nicaragua. Her dog Charlie has been cited as the best-known dog at MIT.

Morgan Kelly writes and develops news and feature content for the natural and physical sciences at Princeton. He came to Princeton in 2011 after almost five years as the science writer for the University of Pittsburgh, where he covered the natural sciences, engineering and information sciences. He previously was the health reporter for the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, during which time he traveled throughout Louisiana one month after Hurricane Katrina, uncovered a drug company’s plan to increase the price of birth control for poor women, and was kissed by Jack Hanna’s dingo, among other things. He earned his master’s degree in journalism from Boston University in 2005 and his bachelor’s in history from UNC-Asheville in 2003. His career in newspapers and university communications began with driving a forklift for a small newspaper in his North Carolina hometown and a brief interlude in a truck-axle factory.

Margot Kushel's research is informed by her 20 years of experience as a practicing internist at San Francisco General Hospital. She studies the health and health care utilization patterns of homeless adults and other vulnerable populations, with a focus on improving outcomes among older homeless adults. Her other interests include the use and misuse of prescription opioid analgesics and improving access and quality of care in safety-net settings. In this work, she uses descriptive epidemiology and develops, implements and evaluates novel interventions designed to improve outcomes. Kushel is the principal investigator for two studies on older homeless adults funded by the National Institute on Aging. One focuses on the causes and consequences of geriatric conditions, the other on family-assisted housing as an intervention. Kushel has also obtained support for her work as a mentor for junior investigators interested in improving health outcomes among older vulnerable populations. She is co-director of the UCSF Primary Care Research Fellowship, which trains primary care physicians and recent Ph.D.s in research of relevance to primary care. Kushel obtained her M.D. from Yale and completed a residency, chief residency and fellowship in internal medicine at UCSF. Twitter: @mkushel

Prof. Langer’s lab works at the interface of biotechnology and materials science, focusing on the development and testing of new polymer systems for tissue engineering and the delivery of compounds such as insulin, anti-cancer drugs, growth factors, proteins, gene therapy agents, and vaccines to specific areas of the body. In 2013, for example, researchers from his lab showed that insulin can be delivered orally in mice, if it’s encapsulated in antibody-coated nanoparticles that interact with receptors on the wall of the intestine, brokering entry into the bloodstream.

The most-cited engineer in history (with an h-index of 211), Langer is the author of more than 1,300 articles and holder of nearly 1,100 patents. He is the recipient of every major prize in engineering, including the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2002, the United States National Medal of Science (2006) and National Medal of Technology and Innovation (2011), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013), and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2015). He has helped to start at least 25 startups making products to treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and schizophrenia. On Langer Lab spinoff, MicroCHIPS, is working to miniaturize an implantable, wirelessly controlled chip — first developed by Langer and MIT colleague Michael Cima — to dispense precise doses of medication inside the body. Another spinoff, Living Proof, sells hair-thickening compounds and boasts actor Jennifer Aniston as investor and spokesperson.