Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Genome Editing: Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation with Sheila Jasanoff

Sheila Jasanoff, Filipe Almeida

2022 Breakthrough Conversations

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Sheila Jasanoff. She talked about her role as Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, the ethics of genome editing and the importance of doing interdisciplinary research.

The interview series provided an intimate personal atmosphere, in which high-level guests, speakers and panelists of the Falling Walls Science Summit 2022 talked about their individual research, career paths and experiences.

The Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversations are supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and Springer Nature.

Martha Stewart

Sheila Jasanoff

Harvard University

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in her field, she has authored more than 130 articles and chapters and is author or editor of more than 15 books, including The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, Designs on Nature, The Ethics of Invention, and Can Science Make Sense of Life? Her work explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies. She founded and directs the STS Program at Harvard; previously, she was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell. She has held distinguished visiting appointments at leading universities in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US.

Jasanoff served on the AAAS Board of Directors and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Her honors include, most recently, the 2022 Holberg Prize – dubbed the Nobel prize for social science and humanities – for her extensive contributions to the field of science and technology studies. She is also the recipient of the SSRC’s Hirschman prize, the Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar-Lüst award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ehrenkreuz from the Government of Austria, and foreign memberships in the British Academy and the Royal Danish Academy. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Twente and Liège.

Filipe Almeida

Springer Nature

Filipe studied the influence of the biomechanics of the tumor microenvironment at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, and most recently developed composite biomaterials for the delivery of anticancer drugs at NOVA University of Lisbon. Previously, at Queen Mary University of London, where he obtained his PhD in 2015, where he studied how skin cells respond to their microenvironment by using advanced microfabricated biomaterials, and developed micropatterned surfaces for high-content imaging and drug screening. Filipe’s interests span mechanobiology, biomechanics, cellular imaging, tissue engineering, nanotheranostics and cancer therapies. Filipe joined Nature Biomedical Engineering in November 2021 and he is based in Berlin.

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