School of Humanities and Sciences
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Paul N. Edwards
Senior Lecturer, Inter-Departmental Programs
BioI retired in January 2026 to escape rising fascism in the USA. Until then, I was Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. I also co-directed the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative with Prof. Steve Luby.
I'm also Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan, where I worked for 19 years in the School of Information, the Dept. of History, and the STS Program. I taught previously at Stanford from 1992-1998, in the STS Program and the Computer Science Dept.
I study the history, politics, and culture of information infrastructures, especially climate knowledge systems. My books include A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001, co-edited with Clark Miller). With Janet Vertesi (Princeton), I'm academic editor of the MIT Press book series Infrastructures.
I served as one of 234 Lead Authors for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I (Physical Sciences), released in August 2021.