My research can be broadly described as an inquiry into the cultural ways of constructing new knowledge and technologies, with a focus on empirical and theoretical questions concerning governance of emerging technologies and technological change in the context of market relations. I am particularly interested in technologies associated with a transformative promise and with controversial claims regarding their content, impacts and implications, such as nanotechnologies, converging technologies, radio frequency identification, wearable computers, and the world wide web. I have studied scientific, corporate and policy making settings, as well as their intersections, primarily by way of organisational ethnography.

As a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell, since October 2007 I have worked on the brokering of collaborations and university-industry knowledge and technology transfer around emerging nanotechnologies. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual “nano” cases into university regulations and procedures? To address these questions, my research aims at analysis of collaboration as an element of scientific organizational discourse and of organizational accounting. This research project is jointly supported by the Department of Science & Technology Studies (S&TS) and Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS) at Cornell as a part of the Social and Economic Issues in Nano (SEIN) initiative.

Between 2002 and 2008 I conducted fieldwork with major IT corporations in Europe looking at business to business marketing of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies in the UK, and also at marketing of innovative technologies of visualisation (wearable displays) to consumers in France. This corporate anthropology research, which includes my DPhil thesis (Oxford) and a postdoctoral project (Ecole des Mines and Telecom-ParisTech, France), examines the construction of credible accounts of emerging technologies by corporate actors (marketing in particular) in the situations of uncertainty about the properties of new technologies.

As a part of my more general interest in emerging technologies and policy making process, I have taken part in the European Commission CONTECS (Converging Technologies) project on the roles of social sciences and humanities in converging (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) technologies in 2006-2008.

A summary list of my research interests:

• University-industry collaboration around nanotechnologies as an organisational phenomenon
• The policy and politics of emerging technologies
• The boundaries of silence: non-disclosures and the creation of collaborative spaces
• An ethnographic perspective on marketing knowledge and marketing theory
• Market experimentations, and product ‘launch’ as a corporate practice

I received my DPhil in Management Studies degree (2007) from the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, where I was awarded a Science and Technology Studies studentship. Before joining S&TS and CNS at Cornell, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at Ecole des Mines and the Department of Economics and Social Sciences (SES) at Telecom-ParisTech in Paris, France (2006 and 2007). I also hold BSc and MSc in biophysics and radiation ecology (1996) from the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI). My interest in the social dimensions of science and technology was prompted by my professional experience in international public communications for an intergovernmental non-proliferation programme (ISTC) based in Moscow, Russia. I pursued an MSc in Science, Culture and Communication at the University of Bath (UK) as a UK FCO Chevening scholar in 2001/2002. As a visiting scholar I conducted research at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) of the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2008; the Centre for Sociology of Innovation (CSI), Ecole des Mines, Paris in 2006; and at the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS, formerly Nerdi) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam in 2002.