Shobita Parthasarathy

@shobitap.org

5137 Followers 152 Following

Science, tech, and innovation politics/policy incl patents. Author: next book on politics of inclusive innovation in India. #STS. Prof & Director, Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, U of Michigan. Expert Voices columnist, Science. shobitap.org

Our up-and-coming scientist is further discouraged by the corrosion of the merit principle that once made American research the envy of the world. What began with the NSF’s “broader impacts” criterion, which was a reasonable effort to ensure taxpayer funds benefit society, has evolved into a sweeping distortion of the selection process that reduces mobility for the best researchers. Between 2021 and 2024, the share of new NSF grants focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives surged from fractions of a percent to more than a quarter. Our scientist has learned the new rules from principal investigators she has worked for, and is tempted to dress up her otherwise excellent technical proposals with ideological language to survive review. Until recently, NASA required research proposals to include plans for furthering “inclusion goals,” which were to be reviewed by review panels one-half composed of “diversity, equity, and inclusion professionals.”
Establish Metascience Capabilities. Agencies should establish metascience capabilities that evaluate what programs actually work and drive organization-wide reforms. Core responsibilities should include conducting research on how factors such as funding mechanisms, peer review, and publication practices affect scientific outcomes; piloting novel funding mechanisms and institutional models; and evaluating pilots and informing agency-wide portfolio management. These functions should be established at a sufficiently high level within agencies to effect real, cross-agency change.
Identify Exceptional Talent Nationwide. S&T workforce programs should identify and support all talented Americans across geographies, incomes, and demographics. Exceptional talent is defined by demonstrated technical ability, not background or identity. Agencies should therefore anchor selection processes in criteria predictive of STEM success, such as reasoning assessments, domain competitions, engineering portfolios, and technical work, rather than relying on self-selection, essays, institutional referrals, or polish and credentials. Agencies should leverage merit-based identification mechanisms that cover as many people as possible (e.g., SAT scores or other standardized quantitative assessments) to find overlooked talent.
Support a Diverse Portfolio of Institutions. The Federal Government should reflect a portfolio of institutions that collectively advance the core objectives of the Nation’s S&T enterprise, including conducting a range of scientific work, training the next generation of scientists, and translating scientific discoveries into concrete benefits for Americans. Agencies should identify objectives that remain unaddressed because no existing institution is well-suited to pursue them. One notable gap is agile, mid-scale science: infrastructure-heavy, multidisciplinary basic research that requires coordinated teams of ten to a hundred people. Agencies have begun to address these gaps through new models like the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) X-Labs and certain Advanced Research Projects Agency programs. Agencies should consider these models and experiment with additional designs to enable new types of scientific pursuits.
Many of the Administration’s strategic technology priorities, including AI, quantum information science, semiconductors, advanced communications, robotics, advanced manufacturing, nuclear fission and fusion, and space systems, all rely on foundational research across the physical sciences, computer science, and engineering. However, the physical sciences and engineering have declined as a share of the Federal research portfolio over an extended period, even as the strategic importance of these fields has grown. Agencies are encouraged to prioritize both the absolute level and the relative share of funding directed within budget guidance levels to the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, materials science, space science, etc.), computer science, and supporting engineering and mathematical disciplines, especially within national security-relevant research portfolios. In addition, to support Administration priorities in biotechnology and biomanufacturing, agencies should prioritize foundational research in the biological sciences over the life sciences, a broader category not focused on foundational research.
The United States conducts research openly, publishes freely, and shares methods transparently. These values are central to scientific progress. However, there is a critical difference between sharing information on one’s own terms and being exploited; the parts of a scientific enterprise that are not shared are often its comparative advantages. These are precisely what our competitors work hardest to extract, leveraging human capital educated in our universities, harvesting data from our papers while restricting access to their own, and scaling breakthroughs first achieved in our laboratories on their factory floors.
Experiment With AI-Native Scientific Institutions: Today’s funding structures, publication systems, and credit mechanisms were built for a world of human-paced discovery. Begin the transition to AI-native institutions, including through faster and more open forms of scientific publication, more granular credit attribution, and new market mechanisms that direct resources to problems where breakthroughs matter most.
Organize Pre-Competitive Consortia and Grand Challenges: The Apollo Program and the Human Genome Project succeeded because the Federal Government marshaled scientific effort at a scale no single institution could match. Leverage grand challenges that pull breakthroughs forward, and create moonshot-scale missions for issues of national importance. Support industry consortia and use federal resources to break shared engineering bottlenecks in foundational areas, as Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company (EUV LLC) did for semiconductor lithography.
Strengthen Public-Private Partnerships and Talent Flows: The university is no longer the only home of America’s most innovative scientific research. Expand agency-adjacent foundations, focus Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs to build strategic capabilities, and support joint centers among industry, academia, and federal facilities. Scale industry Ph.D. and postdoc fellowships that move talent fluidly between sectors, drawing on America’s private sector strengths to bring industry-scale resources to our academic researchers.
A smaller proportion of American citizens now fill post-graduate spots in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Our competitors are channeling unprecedented resources into science and engineering, taking a whole-of-society approach to seize the high ground in strategic technologies. The AI revolution, meanwhile, is transforming the conduct of science, and legacy scientific institutions and infrastructure are not ready to take full advantage of this transformation.
Government funding of research and development, especially basic science in the academy and national labs, has rightly grown in the eight decades since Bush’s report. But private industry has become by far the largest source of research and development (R&D) funding in the United States, with its share nearly doubling from the 1950s to today. American companies now deploy around $700 billion annually, more than triple the combined spending from government and higher education. This evolution has made the pie bigger for everybody and should be welcomed across the research ecosystem, but it demands a corresponding adjustment to the nature of the Federal Government’s contributions.
In preparing this report, I have consulted widely across the country’s scientific enterprise, from entrepreneurs driving world-changing breakthroughs in fusion technology, to researchers eager to pursue bold ideas in neuroscience at our universities, to venture capitalists funding revolutionary platforms for drug discovery. Their message is clear and inspiring: given the right conditions, American ingenuity will continue to achieve the impossible.
First, the U.S. research system should prioritize the individual scientist over legacy institutions. If we are serious about expanding what our scientists can do, we must invest directly in American researchers and the bold ideas that drive them. Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it. Federal funding agencies should support a broader range of performers, including a new generation of mission-driven research organizations, to expand our scientific horizons. And these agencies should organize themselves around the interdisciplinary frontiers of science today, rather than the academic silos of the last century.
Abstract for: Patent Applications as Glimpses into the Sociotechnical Imaginary: Ethical Speculation on the Imagined Futures of Emotion AI for Mental Health Monitoring and Detection NADIA KARIZAT, University of Michigan, USA ALEXANDRA H. VINSON, University of Michigan, USA SHOBITA PARTHASARATHY, University of Michigan, USA NAZANIN ANDALIBI, University of Michigan, USA
The Paradox of ‘Algorithmic’ Accountability and its Implications for Design DIVYA RAMESH∗, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA and MBZUAI, UAE SHOBITA PARTHASARATHY, University of Michigan, USA NIKOLA BANOVIC, University of Michigan, USA Accountability calls for clearly defined relationships and responsibilities of different stakeholders to ensure benefits from AI and algorithmic systems are distributed equitably. While stakeholders across academia, industry, and civil society have championed mechanisms like audits and impact assessments to achieve accountability, such ideas have met limited success, suggesting that the accountability discourse is often captured by “solutionist” tendencies. Here, we treat algorithmic accountability as a discursive object to examine these tendencies. Employing a critical discourse analysis of 240 scholarly documents in the ACM digital library, we find that while the discourse has varied meanings and aims that embody ideals of social change, it remains limited by computing-centric relations and interventions. By reflecting on two case studies from our Responsible AI research, we show that solutionism in the accountability discourse creates a narrow focus on AI and algorithms in three ways: it occludes multi-stakeholder and reciprocal dynamics (e.g., ignoring questions of accountability beyond the algorithm), prioritizes postmaterial concerns (like bias and fairness) over the tangible and urgent requirements of communities, and flattens power relations that are deeply situated in cultural contexts. We propose a framework that shifts the focus to the politics of knowledge and expertise to help cultivate accountability sensibilities in the pursuit of AI innovation.
From FYI Science Policy newsletter: NSF proposes grant policy updates based on OMB rule The National Science Foundation is seeking comment on its plan to bring its grant policies into alignment with the sweeping rule proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget in late May, including by changing grant termination provisions, disallowing publication costs, and removing references to fixed-price awards. Regarding indirect costs, the draft adds that indirect cost rate recovery on NSF awards is always subject to the availability of funds, and that organizations may not be able to recover full indirect costs if sufficient award funding is not available. The draft includes additional provisions related to research security and removing requirements from rescinded Biden-era executive orders. The document is open for comment until Aug. 24, while the comment period for the OMB proposed rule closes July 13. As the end of the fiscal year approaches, NSF has awarded far fewer grants and less funding compared to previous years, Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) said at a House Science Committee hearing last week, citing data from Grant Witness. Whitesides suggested that grantmaking at NSF may have slowed because political appointees at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are now approving grant awards. NSF declined to comment on Whitesides’s remarks.
List of books supposedly written by Alexander H. Blackwell, about AI and digital technologies.
Picture of US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is muscular.
Text of letter to Senator Gary Peters, opposing the proposed dissolution of the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate.
Panel #66: Engaging Policy in STS Research and Practice Abstract: Throughout its history, the STS community has engaged with the important policy questions of the day, showing how public issues are constructed in tandem with evidenceand expertise, and how technological infrastructures are inseparable from social systems. STS scholars have worked to have their insights recognized by policy makers and have used their direct policy engagements to advance knowledge of policy processes. The past decade, however, has seen massive shifts in the policy landscape–including in the ways that research is funded, evidence is valued, and expertise is constructed–as well as new substantive issues at the intersection of science, technology, and policy. This panel asks what STS scholars are bringing to, and taking away from, their engagements with evolving policy processes. What STS tools best help us understand policy issues, and where do new circumstances require new theories and analytical methods? How can STS analysis not only advance knowledge but shape effective political action? And how does engagement with policy function as an intellectual project in its own right? This open panel invites submissions from across sectors (e.g., environment, innovation, health, criminal justice), and with historical and global perspectives (particularly outside the United States and Europe).
The Trump administration finalized a new policy on Thursday that would strip job protections from up to 50,000 federal workers, a move that would make it easier for President Trump to remove or discipline them, in his latest effort to dismantle the federal work force. Until now, the roughly 4,000 people appointed by the president, known as political appointees, were the only federal workers who could be fired at will. The policy issued on Thursday allows the administration to expand that number to include career employees whom the administration considers to also have policy-related roles. For these employees, any whistle-blower complaints would be handled by their agencies internally and not the independent office of special counsel as it has been in the past.
Videos on social media that were verified by The New York Times contradict the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the fatal shooting of a man by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. The Department of Homeland Security said the episode began after a man approached Border Patrol agents with a handgun and they tried to disarm him. But footage from the scene shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him.
Inaccurate Grokepdia entry that claims, for example, that my first cook compared US and Indian approaches to genetic testing for breast cancer (it does not). Grokepedia text: Shobita Parthasarathy is an American professor of public policy and women's and gender studies at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where she serves as director and co-founder of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program.[1][2] Her research centers on the comparative politics of science and technology governance, including the social implications of biotechnology, intellectual property regimes, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and gene editing, and challenges related to equity, inequality, and public trust in scientific innovation.[1][3] Parthasarathy is the author of two books—Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press, 2012), which compares U.S. and Indian approaches to genetic testing for breast cancer, and Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which critiques the political influences shaping patent systems for biotechnological inventions.[2][4] She has contributed to policy discussions, including congressional testimony on science policy, and co-hosts the podcast The Received Wisdom, which examines governance strategies for science and technology to address global challenges like inequality and expert distrust.[5][6] Currently, her ongoing projects include books on failures in technological innovation and strategies to enhance public trust in science, alongside recent publications in journals such as Science critiquing the uncritical scaling of technologies.[1][3]
ANSES demonstrates how such expertise can operate in practice. As France’s national agency for health and safety in food, environment, and work environment, it assesses risks ranging from pesticide exposure and air pollution to food contaminants and occupational hazards. Acting independently, it informs policymaking, anticipates emerging threats, and ensures that assessments are transparent and interdisciplinary. ANSES is a world leader in integrating socioeconomic and social science perspectives into risk assessment, while maintaining close engagement with stakeholders, civil society, and institutions. It has advanced systemic approaches such as One Health, which recognizes interdependence between human, animal, plant and environmental health, and the exposome, which accounts for the lifetime history of exposures that affect health. All these initiatives make scientific expertise socially robust: they encompass not only the technical dimensions of risk but also their determinants, their implications for society, and the governance challenges they raise. As such, they offer resources to identify and address the deeper reasons for mistrust in scientific expertise.
Your 2026 word: Joyous!!!
Image of an overhead view of people conversing around tables, some covered with books, at the NASA library. Also features the following text: “I get very creative when I go there,” he said. “There’s nothing like going to the bookshelf, picking out a book, and then seeing the one next to it. You start to browse.” The Space Science Data Coordinated Archive has been offline for several months. With it inaccessible and the library closing, NASA is losing both history and vital information for future space missions, according to Dr. Williams and other scientists. “It’s not like we’re so much smarter now than we were in the past,” Dr. Williams said. “It’s the same people, and they make the same kind of human errors. If you lose that history, you are going to make the same mistakes again.”
Text from NYT article: Patients over age 65 were 20 to 30 percent more likely than younger ones to discontinue the drugs and less likely to return to them. What explains this pattern? As many as 20 percent of patients may experience gastrointestinal problems. “Nausea, sometimes vomiting, bloating, diarrhea,” Dr. Anderson said, ticking off the most common side effects. Linda Burghardt, a researcher in Great Neck, N.Y., started taking Wegovy because her doctor thought it might reduce arthritis pain in her knees and hips. “It was an experiment,” said Ms. Burghardt, 79, who couldn’t walk far and had stopped playing pickleball. Within a month, she suffered several bouts of stomach upset that “went on for hours,” she said. “I was crying on the bathroom floor.” She stopped the drug. Some patients find that medication-induced weight loss lessens rather than improves fitness, because another side effect is muscle loss. Several trials have reported that 35 to 45 percent of GLP-1 weight loss is not fat, but “lean mass” including muscle and bone.
Describes the top line conclusions of a new report on the impacts of advanced nuclear reactors, including that they will 1) entrench global disparities, 2) privilege markets over the public good, 3) disregard local and indigenous knowledge, 4) intensify environmental injustices, and 5) abandon promises of local development and empowerment.
Paragraph from New York Times articles that says: "The girl would emerge as the chief witness against Mr. Gaetz in the Justice Department sex trafficking investigation. The investigation ended with the department declining to bring charges. Among the reasons prosecutors did not move forward was their concern about whether she would be seen as a credible witness after being exposed to cross-examination by defense lawyers, according to people familiar with the investigation."
Sign that says: “The views expressed in this TSA controlled video do not represent the views of the Wayne County Airport Authority. The Wayne County Airport Authority does not engage in partisan politics. Thank you.
From Wikipedia: Hutchins served as President of the University of Chicago until 1945, and as the University's Chancellor until 1951. During his Chancellorship, he recruited a commission to inquire into the proper function of the media. By 1947, the Hutchins Commission issued their report on the "social responsibility" of the press. Hutchins was notable as a defender of academic freedom. When the University was accused of fostering communism in 1935 (by Charles Rudolph Walgreen, who claimed his niece had been indoctrinated with communist ideas whilst studying there) and again in 1949, Hutchins defended the right of the University's faculty to teach as they wished, arguing that the best way to defeat communism was through open debate and scrutiny, rather than suppression. "Hutchins stood behind his faculty and their right to teach and believe as they wished, insisting that communism could not withstand the scrutiny of public analysis and debate."
Washington Post Opinion headline. Jeanine Pirro: The fight to make D.C. safe and beautiful.
Cement pole on a San Francisco street, bearing a sticker that reads, “Using A.I. is Loser Behavior.”
Black and white posed picture of Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski. Her hands look unusually glassy.
Image of participants in the webinar, Making Tech Work for Everyone. How can technologists better serve civil society? What kinds of training do they need, and how can they serve respectfully? How can civil society organizations benefit from technologists and critical tech perspectives? Join University of Michigan's Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program on May 20th for a webinar addressing these questions, featuring alumni Trevor Odelberg, Divya Ramesh, Melvin Washington II, and Annabella Vidrio as well as Managing Director Molly Kleinman, and myself! We'll feature short presentations, audience Q&A, and breakout rooms to ensure robust conversation with participants.
Text from NYT article: Ember McCoy, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan who studies the politics of air pollution, found out on Monday that her N.S.F. grant was canceled. She did not receive an official reason for the cancellation. But she sensed it was coming, she said, because in the United States, the places with the highest rates of air pollution are low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Ms. McCoy was planning to use the rest of her grant money to pay community partners in southwest Detroit, with whom she collaborates to conduct research. She also hoped to use the funds to host a public presentation about her research for the community she studies. There is also a picture of homes in River Rouge, Michigan.
Washington Post headline: Tinder lets you flirt with AI characters. Three of them dumped me. Lede: We tested the dating site’s new AI bot, which purportedly helps improve your flirting skills. Here’s how it went. Picture of a robot in a kissing booth.
When I attended the University of Michigan, I *was* the poster child for DEI. Literally. Photos of me were used without my consent and plastered all over campus - on bus ads, banners, tv screens taller than I am. At the time it made me angry - not only did I look terrible, to me, the ads represented a shiny bright version of campus that was diverse, equitable, and inclusive that did not align with my experience there. My face was being used to sell a lie. My UMich experience wasn’t just bright and happy memories. It involved being harassed by strangers walking to and from campus, scrubbing anti Muslim graffiti off of the diag (the center of our campus), and watching my friends on the board of the Muslim Student Association deal with their org email being bombarded with death threats and racist hate speech from strangers (and also alumni!) telling us all to go back to where we came from so the US could bomb us. At the time, our biggest problem wasn’t that admin was too racist to want to help us. This was when people still thought Trump couldn’t possibly win & they just couldn’t really comprehend the level of racism we were dealing with. Now, the racism is coming from inside the house. Ono and the regents have *chosen* to capitulate to the DEI EO because they clearly do not care to fight. Even the illusion of DEI is no longer worth preserving. As a student, I finallly found my intellectual home at Michigan in the ethnic studies departments, the multicultural center, and organizations for students of color. It was there that I learned how to organize and fight for initiatives to counter anti-Muslim racism (and racism generally) on campus. These initiatives gave me a place to process my experiences on campus, give me a reprieve from the isolation I felt, and gave me a little peace of mind so I could focus on the real reason I was at Michigan - to get good grades so I could go to law school. I didn’t know then - and I understand now - that DEI funded all of those…
Image that states: "University leaders must affirm the institutional values they claimed to have held. University leaders must maintain and protect academic freedom. University leaders must protect students, faculty, and staff. University leaders must not remain silent to the attacks on and destruction of higher education. University leaders must lead." "What I have offered informally and formally in the past two years remains: we are living through a historically difficult moment, perhaps unprecedented. Difficulty defines our era. And yet difficulty must be confronted. Difficulty is at the center of our methods as artists and..."
"...continue to work to build a community that is comprised of faculty, staff, and students who come to U-M with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. This diversity contributes to the excellence and dynamism of the University's learning environment." I assure you, the Stamps School's academic program and inititives to support faculty, students, and staff are fully legal and ethical. Secondly, the central claim in the "Dear Colleague" letter is erroneous, which attempts to argue that the United States wasn't founded upon structural racism. Despite efforts to rewrite history, the fact remains that the United States was founded upon systemic and structural racism. Chattel slavery, African Americans designated as 3/5ths a person, broken treaties and forced relocation, and Jim Crow laws are just a few examples of racism that is structural and systemic. A further example that systemic and structural discrimination existed in the country's formation is the fact that women did not have the right to vote until 1920, as suffrage has existed for only 105 years.
...struck down affirmative action in college admission to areas beyond its scope. The order also includes identifying "up to nine potential civil compliance investigations" of organizations including institutions of higher education with endowments over one billion dollars. The Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing order requires federal agencies to terminate "equity-related" grants or contracts and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for emploees, contractors, or grantees. On February 21, 2025, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on the orders. Then, on March 14, a decision from the Fourth Circuit Court of appeals allows the Executive Orders to be enforced while a legal challenge proceeds. In that ruling, Judge Alberto Diaz stated: "And despite hte vitriol now being heaped on DEI, people of good faith who work to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion deserve praise, not opprobrium. For when this country embraces true diversity, it acknowledges and respects the social identity of its people. When it..."
Heading: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion will continue at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design Dear Colleagues, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) will continue at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design because our academic program and DEI initiatives are legally compliant, in alignment with our university values, and an extension of the mission of our school. On Thursday, March 27, 2025 at 3:30pm, President Ono, Provost McCauley, CFO Chatas, and VP for Medical Affairs Runge wrote to the University of Michigan community announcing the elimination of the Office of
First: What can be done, consistent with military security, and with the prior approval of the military authorities, to make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific knowledge? The diffusion of such knowledge should help us stimulate new enterprises, provide jobs for our returning servicemen and other workers, and make possible great strides for the improvement of the national well-being. Second: With particular reference to the war of science against disease, what can be done now to organize a program for continuing in the future the work which has been done in medicine and related sciences? [2] The fact that the annual deaths in this country from one or two diseases alone are far in excess of the total number of lives lost by us in battle during this war should make us conscious of the duty we owe future generations. Third: What can the Government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations? The proper roles of public and of private research, and their interrelation, should be carefully considered. Fourth: Can an effective program be proposed for discovering and developing scientific talent in American youth so that the continuing future of scientific research in this country may be assured on a level comparable to what has been done during the war?
The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (ODEI) and the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion (OHEI) will close. Student-facing services in ODEI will shift to other offices focused on student access and opportunity. The DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan, the umbrella strategy for schools, colleges and units, will be discontinued, along with DEI 2.0 unit plans, related programming, progress reporting, training and funding. Individual leads, who have supported DEI efforts in schools, colleges and units, will refocus their full effort on their core responsibilities. All units will evaluate their web presence to reflect the status of current programmatic directions and for compliance with federal executive orders and guidance.
There are thirteen million legal foreign residents (green card holders) in the United States. If the administration can deport Khalil, it means those 13 million people must live in fear if they dare speak up or publish something that runs afoul of government views. There are more than one million international students in the United States. They, too, may worry that they are no longer free to speak their mind. Punishing even one person for their speech is meant to intimidate others into self-censorship.
NSF will continue to make such things possible – unleashing discoveries and seeding the industries of the future to create jobs, improve lives, and investing in the future. NSF staff continue to work around the clock, even under great stress and uncertainty, to do the hard work that is necessary. They do so because they understand that NSF’s mission is incredibly important to our economic and national security. However, it is equally important that everyone who plays a role in the research enterprise also does their part to communicate broadly the value and impact of America’s scientific enterprise and what it makes possible for individuals, communities, our states, and the nation.