Charis Thompson

Professor Charis Thompson joined the Department of Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley where she was Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and a former Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center. Before moving to Berkeley, she was in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. She is the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies, which won the 2007 Rachel Carson Award from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press 2013). She is currently writing a book, Getting Ahead, on living in the time of Science and Technology elites. She is a recipient of UC Berkeley's Social Science Distinguished Teaching Award. She has served on the Nuffield Council Human Genome Editing Working Group and on the World Economic Forum Global Technology Council on Technology, Values and Policy.

Charis received her PhD from the Sociology (Science Studies) program at UC San Diego, and her BA in Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology at Oxford University. She also holds an Honorary Doctorate (2017) for services to Science and Society, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. For the 2020-2021 Academic year Charis is Visiting Professor for the School of Social Science, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.