Congress Unplugged - Krishanu Saha

Krishanu Saha

Krishanu Saha is an STS and Society in Science Branco-Weiss Fellow. Kris seeks to expand his background in working with nascent human engineered materials to investigate the modeling of diseases at the cellular level with human “reprogrammed” stem cell lines. By drawing on analytical tools in both science and STS, this project will examine the assumptions built into “diseases in a dish.” As these diseases in a dish are constructed through stem cell biology and engineering, laboratory work will be extended to examine the moral, economic, and political status of these objects.

Kris studied Chemical Engineering at Cornell University and University of California, Berkeley. In his dissertation he worked on experimental and computational analyses of neural stem cell development, as well as the design of new materials for adult stem cell culture.

In 2007 he moved to the laboratory of Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a postdoctoral fellow. Since 2006 he has worked with human embryonic stem cells and the institutional policies surrounding them.