STPP Lecture Series

Please join us for an engaging conversation with New York Times technology reporter Kashmir Hill and Shobita Parthasarathy, Faculty Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) Program. Our speakers will explore the intersection of technology and privacy, addressing some of today's most salient issues.Following the talk, Kashmir Hill will be available for a book signing of "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It". 

Join for a conversation with former New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio. In conversation with STPP Director Professor Shobita Parthasarathy, the discussion will explore how urban tech is shaping social policy in “smart cities” like New York and beyond. How can we ensure that emerging technology serves the public interest, and what role can local, state, national, and even international policy play?    

Dr. Krystal Tsosie will describe community-engaged research and describe paths forward that center Indigenous people as the agents of access for their own genomic and health data. The future of Indigenous genomics is not mere inclusion but through recognition of Indigenous genomic and data sovereignty.

Kade Crockford, the director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, will speak about technology, surveillance, and civil liberties.   

 On March 21st, 2022, STPP convened a panel discussion on the role of universities and public policy in cultivating socially responsible engineers.

Join us for a conversation on deploying science, technology, and data for the public good, with Kumar Garg, senior managing director at Schmidt Futures and former assistant director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Professor Shobita Parthasarathy.

Join us for a talk on global vaccine equity and health justice with Fatima Hassan, human rights lawyer, social justice activist, and the founder of the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa; and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Towsley Policymaker in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Jacqueline Patterson, Founder and Executive Director of The Chisholm Legacy Project, and Kyle Whyte, Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and affiliate of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program, discuss environmental and climate justice.

Darshan Karwat, asst. professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University & Tony Reames, asst. professor, School of Environment & Sustainability discuss sustainability, social justice, and public policy.

Ben Green, assistant professor of public policy, and Shobita Parthasarathy, professor of public policy and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program, discuss the social and policy impacts of algorithms in government. 

Erin Simpson, Associate Director of Technology Policy at the Center for American Progress, will join STPP for a conversation about digital contact tracing and privacy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Osagie K. Obasogie is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health.

In this conversation, Paul Abbate, Associate Deputy Director of the FBI, and David Levy, Vice President of Amazon Web Services, will discuss some of the challenges in addressing current cybersecurity threats, formulating policy, and calibrating responses. 

This event has been canceled. 

Priti Krishtel is a 15-year veteran of the global access to medicines movement. In 2006, she co-founded I-MAK, a nonprofit that works to combat the rising cost of prescription drugs by re-imagining the patent system so that people can get the lifesaving medicine they need.  

This event has been postponed.

Layne Scherer is a senior program officer with the Board of Higher Education and Workforce at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Christopher Calabrese, Vice President for Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology will discuss the pros and cons of facial recognition technology, how it is changing many aspects of our lives, and how policymakers should address it.

This event has been canceled.

Join us for a live, unrehearsed, interdisciplinary conversation with faculty from diverse perspectives to explore the idea of Post-Human Creativity.

Drawing on examples from city government in the UK and US, Carrie will share what a Chief Digital Officer does all day, and a glimpse of the future of city government.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a fierce dissenter from the FCC's May 2018 decision to end network neutraility, will have a conversation about the issues with the U-M's associate general counsel, Jack Bernard.

In this talk, Professor Warigia Bowman examines the policymaking and implementation processes for information and communication technologies (“ICT”) in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda from 1990 to 2015.

Has science and technology policymaking changed during the Trump Administration? How? What do the US politics of science and technology look like in 2018? Join us for a lively panel discussion featuring University of Michigan graduates working in science and technology policy in Washington, D.C.

The process of technological displacement of workers began in the automobile industry in the 1960's, and with the rise of connectivity and AI it is accelerating rapidly.

Human experience is the frontline of emerging environmental health problems. This talk discusses how we can more successfully build a research infrastructure for this frontline of experience.

During the past two decades environmental issues and especially climate change have become very divisive issues in U.S. politics, both among political elites and lay persons. This presentation will track these developments with longitudinal data, paying special attention to trends in partisan polarization over climate change using Gallup Poll data from 1997 to 2016.

In recognition of Earth Day, please join us for a very special lecture about what it takes to pass historic air quality legislation. Margo Oge served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for 32 years, the last 18 of which she directed the Office of Transportation Air Quality. Ms. Oge led the Obama Administration’s landmark 2012 Clean Air Act deal with automakers, the nation’s first action targeting greenhouse gases. This regulation will double the fuel efficiency of automakers’ fleets to 54.5 mpg and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2025.

Carl Simon, director of the University of Michigan Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, moderates this panel on transportation policy featuring Peter Sweatman, UM's Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI); Matthew Naud, City of Ann Arbor; and Shannon Bouton, McKinsey Center for Business & Development.