Winickoff, David

David Winickoff heads the Secretariat of the Working Party on Bio-, Nano-, and Converging Technology (BNCT) at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In this capacity he leads research, policy work, and soft law development in the area of science, technology, and innovation at the national and international levels. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School (JD), Cambridge University (MA), and Yale (BA).

Prior to his work at the OECD, he was a tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley, (2010-2017) where he directed the Program on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and supervised PhD students in law, STS, and Environmental Policy. He has also taught courses at the Harvard Kennedy School and is currently an Associated Researcher at the Centre for Health, Law, and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) at Oxford University; and an Associated Researcher at Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS) in Paris.

As a scholar, David works at the intersection of law, bioethics, and STS, focusing on two streams of scholarship:

• Governance of emerging technologies and innovation – David has pioneered the use of trust principles to help govern the use of personal data in genomics research, and developed ideas for enhancing societal capacity to deliberate about technology. His work focuses in the areas of genomics, gene editing, geoengineering, and neurotechnology, among other technologies.
• The role of science and expertise in global governance – David works at the intersection of science and democracy. Under a recent National Science Foundation research grant, he conducted a comparative study of the role of science and expertise in the regulation of biofuels and geoengineering. This work locates “epistemic jurisdiction” – the power to produce or warrant technical knowledge for a given political community, topical arena, or geographical territory – as a central problem for global governance.

With over fifty publications in academic journals and other outlets, David’s articles have appeared in Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Nature Climate Change, and the Yale Journal of International Law, among others. He has served on expert panels of the U.S. National Academies of Science, U.K. Royal Academy, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, and has also served as an expert for the French Parliament. He is on the Programme Committee of the Rathenau Institute in The Hague.

At Sciences Po, Winickoff teaches courses on the intersection of technology and global governance.

Fields of Expertise: 

• Innovation Studies
• Governance of Technology
• Science and Technology Studies
• Bioethics

Contact: david.winickoff@sciencespo.fr