Janet Vertesi
Janet Vertesi received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University in 2009, where her dissertation analyzed the use of images to both conduct scientific investigations of Mars and plan robotic operations on its surface, demonstrating how interactions with and around Mars Rover images create a social space that is both public and political. She holds a B.A. in Religion, Literature and the Arts from the University of British Columbia, and an M.Phil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. She has won many awards for her undergraduate and graduate work, including NSF, Mellon, Sage, SSHRC, and History of Science Society/NASA History Office Fellowships; and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Irvine's Informatics Department. Her numerous publications cover a variety of topics in the history and sociology of science, technology, and visual studies, including “Picturing the Moon: Hevelius and Riccioli’s Visual Debate” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, “Pygmalion’s Legacy: Cyborg Women in Science Fiction,” and an award-winning article published in Social Studies of Science (2008):“’Mind the Gap’: The London Underground Map and Users’ Experience of Urban Space.” At Princeton Vertesi is completing her manuscript, Seeing Like a Rover: Images in Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, and co-editing a new volume of the classic Representation in Scientific Practice. She is also conducting a second interdisciplinary research project, “The Social Life of Spacecraft,” funded by an NSF Social Computational Systems grant, which introduces a comparative ethnographic aspect (a study of the Cassini mission to Saturn) to her analysis of the socio-technical organization of space missions. She continues her work in interdisciplinary studies in informatics with current publications at CHI focusing on technologies in transnational contexts. Her teaching experience as a graduate student included such courses as the history of computers, science in the public arena, and the sociology of science, as well as a Freshman seminar she designed on the relationships between science and art. At Princeton she is teaching courses on The Sociology of Technology and Critical Approaches to Human-Computer Interaction.