Janet A. Vertesi

Associate Professor of Sociology and Director, Program in Design in the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education

Dubbed “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet” in the Times Literary Supplement, Janet Vertesi is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University, where she is also Associate Director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, Director of the Program in Design, and incoming inaugural Director of Princeton AI Lab’s newest research initiative, Princeton Societal AI. She is known for two decades of NSF-funded ethnographic studies into how NASA’s distributed robotic spacecraft teams work together effectively to produce scientific and technical results. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How robots, teams and images craft knowledge of Mars (Chicago, 2015), Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams (Chicago, 2020), and the forthcoming The Cost of Crisis: How Funding Uncertainty and Neoliberal Austerity Broke Big Science,as well as co-editor with David Ribes and others of digitalSTS (Princeton, 2019). With a Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University and a research program that spans critical design, human-computer interaction, and sociology of organizations, Vertesi is additionally a longtime critic and conscientious objector to the personal data economy. She blogs about her Opt Out Experiment at www.optoutproject.net and co-founded the non-profit Tech Reclaimers to help people reclaim their personal digital sovereignty. In addition to numerous past roles advising NASA science missions, Vertesi also serves as an advisory board member to the Data & Society Institute and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.