Shobita Parthasarathy

Shobita Parthasarathy is Associate Professor of Public Policy and a Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She studies policy and politics related to science and technology, as well as the politics of evidence and expertise in policymaking, in the United States, Europe, and India. She is the author of numerous articles and a book, Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press, 2007). Findings from this book, which compared the development of genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer in the United States and Britain, helped to inform the 2013 US Supreme Court case over gene patents. Her second book, Patently Political: Life, Markets, and Morality in the United States and Europe, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press. Comparing recent controversies over life form patents in the United States and Europe, it demonstrates how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent systems in fundamental ways. She is starting a new project that aims to develop a better understanding of grassroots innovation in India, which often takes place outside the global marketplace and is low-tech and small-scale, in the hope that it might usefully inform both our theories of innovation and our innovation and development policies. She is a Faculty Affiliate in UM's Science, Technology, and Society and Feminist Science Studies programs. She sits on the Council of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the Governing Council of the Science and Democracy Network.

To support her research, Prof. Parthasarathy has received fellowships and grants from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition, and Tax Law (Germany), the American Bar Foundation, the Wellcome Trust (UK), the National Science Foundation, and various programs at the University of Michigan.

Earlier in her career, Prof. Parthasarathy held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University, the University of California–Los Angeles, and University of Cambridge. She has also worked for the National Academy of Sciences, RAND, Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. She holds Masters and PhD degrees in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University and a Bachelor's Degree in Biology from the University of Chicago.