The Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) is pleased to announce that the Society for Social Studies of Science has bestowed its highest award, the John Desmond Bernal Prize, on Dr. Paul N. Edwards, CISAC Senior Research Scholar and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Society (STS).

The J.D. Bernal Prize recognizes distinguished contributions to the field of Science & Technology Studies (STS) across the recipient’s career. Past winners have included founders of the field, such as Bruno Latour, Donald Mackenzie, and Donna Haraway.

His Bernal Prize citation notes that through his rigorous scholarship, inspiring teaching, and mentorship, Paul Edwards has demonstrated the power of STS to address and to reshape planetary predicaments and societal challenges. In our fraught times, his work is a model for how critical inquiry might transform governance and policy.

Edwards’ first book, The Closed World (MIT 1996), illuminated the mutual shaping of computers, Cold War military strategy, and the cognitive sciences after World War II. It received honorable mention for the Rachel Carson Prize and has been translated into French and Japanese. His second book, A Vast Machine (MIT 2010), a wide-ranging history of climate models and knowledge infrastructures, received major awards from the Society for the History of Technology and the American Meteorological Society and was listed as a Book of the Year by The Economist magazine.

Find the announcement at 4sonline.org