Aaron Panofsky PhD

Aaron Panofsky, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology. He is a sociologist of science, knowledge, and culture with a special interest in the history, intellectual organization, and social implications of genetics. His recent book Misbehaving Science is a history of the field of behavior genetics that looks at how the way scientists have dealt with successive episodes of controversy have affected the field’s social organization and limited its intellectual possibilities.

He has also written critically about attempts to apply behavior genetics to problems of social policy and education. Another project looks at different forms of non-expert, public participation in science, and the social and material technologies that enable it. Through this project, he has studied how patient advocates try to affect research in medical genetics and how Internet technologies mediate different styles of participation in scientific and social innovation. He is currently working on projects about the uses of economic quantification to evaluate teachers and controversies about how genetics research contributes to and confuses knowledge about race and racial differences. Professor Panofsky has also published on art, social theory, sociological methods, and the cultural aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Center for American Politics and Public Policy.