Charis Thompson

Charis Thompson is Chancellor’s Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, and a former founding director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at the University of California, Berkeley; and Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current book in progress, Getting Ahead, focuses on minds, bodies, and emotions in an age of populism and technology elites. Getting Ahead is the third in her book series on technology and democracy. The first, Making Parents (2005), won the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and examined gender, race, and agency in relation to reproductive technologies. The second book, Good Science (2013), examined the geopolitics and bioethics of pro-cures innovation economies. Thompson served on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Group on Genome Editing, and currently serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Technology Council on Technology, Values, and Policy, as well as UC Berkeley’s Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee, and the faculty advisory board of the Center for Race and Gender. She is a recipient of the Social Science Division Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2017 received an Honorary Doctorate from the Norwegian Science and Technology University.