Browse School of Humanities and Sciences

Kyoko Sato

Associate Director, Science, Technology and Society

BioKyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Her research examines technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. Her areas of research include: the politics of expertise; nuclear politics; narratives and representation of nuclear technology and radiation protection; and Covid-19 governance. She co-edited (with Soraya Boudia and Bernadette Bensaude Vincent) Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima, a 2022 interdisciplinary post-Fukushima reflection on the development of the global nuclear order. She has conducted fieldwork in various areas affected by nuclear technology (e.g., Fukushima, Hiroshima, Nagasaki; communities surrounding TMI, Hanford site, and other facilities; Church Rock) to examine the dynamics and relationships among global and national nuclear governance, expertise, and democratic citizenship. Her previous work examined interdisciplinary knowledge production in the United States and the politics of genetically modified food in France, Japan, and the United States. She has published in journals such as Science, Technology and Human Values; East Asian Science, Technology and Society; Theory and Society; and 科学技術社会論研究 (Journal of Science and Technology Studies; in Japanese) and book chapters on the Fukushima disaster both in English and in Japanese. She worked as a journalist in Tokyo before pursuing her PhD in sociology from Princeton University.