Career
She is also Associate Director, and the founding Director, of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at University of California Berkeley. Her research interests are in the social, ethical, and political study of environmental and life sciences, and biomedicine. From that book, she is known for the concept of “ontological choreography”, which describes how different orders of things such as emotions, politics, technologies, and clinical measurements work together in medicine, and for her concept of “promissory capital” and a “biomedical mode of reproduction”.
Thompson has also written on stem cell research, biodiversity conservation, and population.
She is the author of "Good Science: the Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research," (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press 2013) which characterizes the "pro-cures" framing of bioinnovation. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California Berkeley Social Science Division.
Charis Thompson has degrees from the Science Studies program University of California, San Diego (Doctor of Philosophy) and Oxford University (Bachelor Honours). She was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Science, Technology, & Society Department, and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Harvard University.
She has been a visitor at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan and at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École Supérieure des Mines de Paris.
