For Prospective Students:

For general suggestions on applying to the I School's doctoral program, I heartily endorse these advice pages by my colleagues Joshua Blumenstock and Marti Hearst. In particular, note the importance of the statement of purpose in how we evaluate prospective students.

It is worth underlining that I am not looking to train students as carbon copies of my own thinking.  This means I am not necessarily looking for prospective students who are topically interested in biobanking (or histories of statistical techniques, or research infrastructures, or whatever else I've published recently). Rather, I see my role as a mentor in helping you to develop as a scholar within a shared style of thought: this involves asking certain kinds of research questions, deploying certain kinds of research methods, and holding certain kinds of research values. 

Research Questions: I am invested in supporting junior scholars interested in Science and Technology Studies (STS), either as a primary disciplinary identity or as an adjunct to another research framework. I do not expect you to have substantial prior training in STS, but would want to see where STS influences the kinds of questions you want to ask in your statement of purpose. 

Given that STS often demands some degree of dual fluency (in STS as well as in the topical domain you seek to study), it is helpful—but not required—that you have educational or professional experience in the general world of the thing you want to research. This is also something worth noting in your application, particularly if it's far-removed from the domains with which I have research experience (primarily biotech/biomed and laboratory science).  

Research Methods: I am an interpretive social scientist who works primarily with ethnographic and discursive/historical methods. This doesn't mean that you need to be an old-fashioned laboratory ethnographer to work with me, but it does mean I'm probably not an ideal mentor if your primary goals involve design or computational analysis. This said, the I School is a highly interdisciplinary environment, and we encourage prospective students to highlight possible connections (including methodological connections) across multiple faculty in their application. 

Research Values: Epistemology, methodology, and axiology are inextricably joint projects. Resultingly, what and how you want to study are bound up with a set of values as to what it means to live in—or to seek change in—our informational society. In your application materials, I am interested in understanding what those values are to you. This may include connections/commitments to particular communities, your theory of change, or your personal connection to a topic. Another way of putting this is that a commitment to pursuing something like “tech for good” often leaves it a little opaque as to what “good” is understood to mean; I would invite you to be explicit about this.

Last Thought: Regretfully, because of the high volume of interest in our program, I am not able to meet with prospective students in advance of our admissions process or to offer more personalized advice. I also will not respond to emails that use AI to summarize and describe my work—I would far rather engage with your actual interests and questions, which are probably somewhat lateral to my top-line arguments!