John Villasenor

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John Villasenor is a professor of public policy, electrical and computer engineering, management, and law at UCLA, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford. Villasenor’s work considers the technology, policy, and legal issues arising from key technology trends including the growth of artificial intelligence, the increasing complexity and interdependence of today’s networks and systems, and continued advances in computing and communications.

He has written for the Atlantic, Billboard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, Forbes, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Scientific American, Slate, and the Washington Post, and for many academic journals. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, Villasenor was with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed methods of imaging the earth from space. He holds a B.S. from the University of Virginia, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

For more information, please visit Professor Villasenor’s personal page.

Aaron Panofsky

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Aaron Panofsky is a Professor in Public Policy and the Institute for Society and Genetics. Prior to joining UCLA in January of 2008, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at UC Berkeley from 2006 through 2007. Panofsky received his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 2006.

Panofsky’s main research interest is in the sociology of science and knowledge with a special focus on genetics. He recently published his first book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (Chicago, 2014), is an analysis of the causes and consequences of controversy in the field of behavioral genetics. A second major project is investigating how patient advocate groups are seeking to affect the research process in the medical genetics of rare disorders. Of particular interest are the means by which patient advocates and scientists can form successful, mutually beneficial collaborative partnerships. These and other projects fit with his abiding science policy interests in the governance of science and technology and the relationship between expertise and democracy.

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