The STS Department welcomes two new faculty members in Fall 2025. Dr. Verónica Uribe del Águila joins us as an assistant professor, with a focus on design and information studies. Dr. Sara Black begins a position as a lecturer, with a focus on sustainability, agriculture, and critical geography.

Congratulations to the scholars who recently completed their PhDs in Science and Technology Studies! Beck Corby, Gabriel Medina-Kim, and Craig Rothstein all had successful dissertation defenses in the summer of 2025.

STS professors Abby Kinchy and Adam Biggs took part in a conference organized to mark the 50th anniversary of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Vassar College. Each spoke on a panel addressing the conference theme of “Science and the Culture Wars.”

Professor Matthew Wolf-Meyer edited a new book called Proposals for a Caring Economy, which challenges capitalist assumptions about what and who can be cared for. Moving between examples focused on immigration and agriculture, patients and art audiences, green energy transitions and unhoused people, prison abolitionists and clients of domestic violence services, the contributors to the volume argue that we need new ways to conceptualize care and its applications.

Xiomara Jean-Louis (BS, Sustainability Studies, 2024) published her senior thesis in the Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research. The paper is titled “Repairing Activist-Academic Relationships: Defining Methods to Improve Reciprocity and Movement Building in Degrowth”

STS PhD student Fahmi Fahroji won first place in the 2025 McKinney Writing Contest's Graduate Academic Essay category, for his paper, “Coal Extraction and the Unruly Entanglements of Lives and Research in Borneo’s Mining Zones.”

STS PhD student Pratama Pradheksa, currently conducting fieldwork in Indonesia, is working with an organization called Perkumpulan Peneliti Eutenika to offer a free “STS School.” The classes have involved over 150 members of the Indonesian public (environmental advocates, physicians, natural and social scientists, and more) in asking questions like: How can we design an interdisciplinary curriculum in science, technology, and society to address the complexity of problems in society? How can science and technology be used as a strategy to combat environmental injustice? How can we make fair political or policy decisions related to science and technology?

Professor Matthew Wolf-Meyer’s new book, American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within was published by the University of Minnesota Press. This book shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness.

STS professors recently published articles that share insights about our department’s unique approach to education. Nancy D. Campbell published "Harm reduction design: doing health and safety differently" in the journal Drugs, Habits and Social Policy. Jennifer Cardinal and Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn published “Community Work for Climate Resilience: Forging Justice at the Nexus of a Polytechnic and Grassroots Organizations” in the Journal of Sustainability Education.

The STS Department enjoyed a visit from Dr. Nick Kawa, an anthropology professor at the Ohio State University. He gave a talk titled “After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste.” The presentation explored insights from research accompanying various experts—from wastewater treatment workers to golf course superintendents—who approach human bodily waste as a resource for landscape management, including industrial farmlands, urban gardens, municipal sports fields, and city parks. Because the refiguring of bodily waste as a resource is a deeply contested issue, Dr. Kawa’s research raises broader questions about how Americans struggle to manage and make sense of the various excesses of contemporary living—and who carries those burdens.

Professor Tankut Atuk was awarded the Leah M. Ashe Prize for the Anthropology of Medically–Induced Harm from the Society of Medical Anthropology. The prize was given for the paper titled: “If I knew you were a travesti, I wouldn't have touched you”: Iatrogenic violence and trans necropolitics in Turkey. The paper was published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

PhD student Jonathan Givan has been invited as a graduate student collaborator in Dr. Ray Fouché’s Humanity and Technoscience Lab at Northwestern University, part of the DISCO Network, a consortium of investigators working to envision a new anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future.

STS Ph.D. student Sophia Acquisto and ITWS professor Brian Callahan (STS PhD 2018), along with collaborating engineering faculty, were awarded a $300,000 quantum education grant from the RPI-IBM AIRC initiative. They will be making curriculum for quantum workforce development, specifically developing quantum utility pedagogy for young girls at the late middle school/early high school level.

The STS Colloquium featured Dr. Rajani Bhatia of the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany. Dr. Bhatia is currently working on an NSF-funded study on population panics in the context of shifting demographic dynamics and climate change. Her timely presentation focused on the origins and implications of the so-called “great replacement theory.”

Professor Raquel Velho was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled: “The Lifecycles of the Arecibo Observatory: Understanding the social and political contexts of research facility host sites.” The project examines the history of decision-making that enables the formation of new research infrastructures. Dr. Velho explores the consequences of those decisions as science-society interactions throughout the lifecycle of a major astronomy research facility.

Professor Nancy Campbell was awarded the Jerome Fischbach '38 Faculty Travel Award. Since 1963, this annual award has been funded by Jerome Fischbach ’38, to express appreciation for the many contributions faculty have made to the students. The award permits a member of the Rensselaer faculty, who has been actively associated with Rensselaer for 20 years or more, to participate in an international meeting as a representative of Rensselaer.

PhD student Alex Betsos was awarded a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellowship, for their dissertation project about the addiction research that shaped Canadian drug law.