Janet Vertesi

Dubbed “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet” in the Times Literary Supplement, Janet Vertesi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She has spent fifteen years studying NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams as a sociologist of science and technology where she examines issues such as data sharing and work with artificially intelligent agents on the ground. She is also a conscientious objector to the personal data economy and uses critical technical practices to undo the harms of privacy-invasive systems through her well-known “opt out” projects.  

She is the solo author of the books Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams (University of Chicago Press), editor of the groundbreaking collection digitalSTS (Princeton Press) and the MIT Press Infrastructures Series, and has published papers in top-ranked venues in the sociology of science and technology and human-computer interaction. In addition to her work at NASA and in questions of scientific research and collaboration, Professor Vertesi is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton and a former advisory board member of the Data and Society Institute.  More at http://janet.vertesi.com