About

David Guston is Foundation Professor and founding director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. He serves as Associate Vice Provost for Discovery, Engagement and Outcomes within the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. His research focuses on the societal aspects of emerging technologies, research and development policy, technology assessment, public participation in science and technology, and the politics of science policy. Guston has served as principal investigator and director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS-ASU), a National Science Foundation-funded Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center dedicated to studying societal impacts of nanotechnologies and improving societal capacity to understand and make informed choices. He is widely published and cited in these fields, authoring books such as 'Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research,' which received the 2002 Don K. Price Prize from the American Political Science Association. He has co-authored and edited several influential works on science policy and responsible innovation, and is series editor of the 'Yearbook of Nanotechnology in Society' and general editor of the forthcoming 'Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Society.' Guston has also contributed to public science engagement, notably ideating and leading the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, and was the lead editor of a 2017 edition of Mary Shelley's novel. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Responsible Innovation and has served on various national review panels and committees, including the NSF and the National Academy of Engineering. His academic background includes postdoctoral training at Harvard University, a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT, and a B.A. from Yale University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Public relations
• Social Science
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Engineering ethics
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Biology
• Cognitive science
• Epistemology
• Genetics
• Law
• Philosophy
• Management
• Computational biology
• Positive economics

Selected publications

• Responsible innovation scholarship: normative, empirical, theoretical, and engaged

  Journal of Responsible Innovation · 2024 · 31 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Governing with public engagement: an anticipatory approach to human genome editing

  Science and Public Policy · 2024 · 9 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computational biology
  • Biology

  In response to calls for public engagement on human genome editing (HGE), which intensified after the 2018 He Jiankui scandal that resulted in the implantation of genetically modified embryos, we detail an anticipatory approach to the governance of HGE. By soliciting multidisciplinary experts' input on the drivers and uncertainties of HGE development, we developed a set of plausible future scenarios to ascertain publics values-specifically, their hopes and concerns regarding the novel technology and its applications. In turn, we gathered a subset of multidisciplinary experts to propose governance recommendations for HGE that incorporate identified publics' values. These recommendations include: (1) continued participatory public engagement; (2) international harmonization and transparency of multiple governance levers such as professional and scientific societies, funders, and regulators; and (3) development of a formal whistleblower framework.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Inclusive, Equitable and Just Evolution of Gene Editing Technologies: The Case for Integrating Public Engagement in Governing Efforts

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Impact

  Issues in Science and Technology · 2024-07-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  With universities increasingly pursuing societal “impact” as a goal, the academic community must define what impact is and how to bring it about.

  PublisherDOI

• Making the Most of the “Ethical and Societal Considerations” in the CHIPS and Science Act

  Issues in Science and Technology · 2023-05-04 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Faced with a historic opportunity to center societal considerations in scientific research and technology creation, the National Science Foundation can build upon previous work.

  PublisherDOI

• Governing Science, Technology, and Innovation in Hotter Times

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2023-09-19 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Notes and Correspondence

  Science Fiction Studies · 2022-02-27

  article

  Notes and Correspondence Robert M. Philmus, Lisa Swanstrom, Ed Finn, David H. Guston, Anne DeLong, Curt Herrl, Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Sam Hirst, Anna Tahinici, Ed Cueva, Brianna Anderson, and Laken Brooks Charles L. Elkins (1940-2021) It saddens me to report the death, this past December, of Charles Elkins (Chuck to just about everyone but me, including his loving and beloved wife, Mary Jane). Charles was co-editor of SFS during much of my tenure in that capacity, starting in 1982. By then our predecessors had largely or totally dropped out. Dale Mullen, SFS's inspirational source and sine qua non, was the first to leave: health considerations had made it impossible for him to continue the arduous (and literally back-breaking) work of seeing to SFS's actual production (copy editing, printing, record keeping, and mailing inter alia). Dale, of course, returned in 1990-1991 to save SFS from extinction. Darko Suvin subsequently reduced his role, at least seemingly, to that of Contributing Editor while continuing to be a conduit for essays/articles. And Marc Angenot's "leave of absence" proved to be permanent. Dale's departure had dictated moving all of SFS's operations from Terre Haute to Montreal. That posed an intractable problem for Charles's and my co-operation, given the continuous pressure of publishing deadlines. The two of us, though in the same time zone, were 1,500 miles apart. And in 1982, the Apple computer had barely left Steve Jobs's garage, and the Internet wasn't even a figment of someone's imagination (at least so far as I know). We therefore decided, Charles and I, that he would deal mostly with book review(er)s. And he continued to do that, scrupulously, for the next five years (maybe more). My brain still retains film footage, as it were, of my first meeting with Charles. And while there's no date stamp, this must have been in 1980 at the initial Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held in the vicinity of Florida International University (where Charles taught for several decades and also put in a stint as a Dean). My brain hasn't retained a sound track of our meeting, but I'm sure that, inter alia, we discovered our shared admiration for Kenneth Burke, whom Charles knew personally. (I found out only a few days ago that the University of Pennsylvania holds their correspondence.) We also must have talked about Southern California, where he spent his early years and where I had gone to grad school. Charles had a rather distinctive voice which I found to be extraordinarily well-suited to conveying his mindset—a voice capable of at once expressing both amusement and (when called for) moral outrage. One instance in particular remains firmly in my memory. In talking with me, telephonically, about his first heart attack (my recollection is that it occurred 25-30 years ago, but Mary Jane says it was closer to 40), he told me that as he was lying on a hospital corridor gurney, a doctor filling a syringe asked: "Do you know how much this anticoagulant costs?" And then, uninvited, answered his own question: "$20,000." That made me furious: not at the price per se (which I subsequently found out was 50 times more than that of the same-purposed, but more efficacious, med. generally used in Europe), but because it hadn't occurred to Dr. Thoughtless to ascertain that his patient had medical insurance [End Page 200] before volunteering the price info. Charles instead found the whole bizarre incident mildly funny. Likewise self-revelatory is his October 2021 response to Art Evans's news re: the republication of one of Charles's early SFS essays. He expressed astonishment that anyone would be interested in his 1976 article on Asimov and would be willing to pay for its reprint. "Wow," he said, "maybe I should frame the check!" Charles didn't leave behind a long (auto)bibliography. Apart from a book on Robert Silverberg, his publications consist mostly of a relatively small number of essays and a larger number of book reviews. But I am not aware of any version of, say...

  PublisherDOI

• Imagination, Annotated

  Science Fiction Studies · 2022-03-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Amplifying the Call for Anticipatory Governance

  The American Journal of Bioethics · 2021 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This article is referred to by:Response to Open Peer Commentaries on "Developing a Reflexive, Anticipatory, and Deliberative Approach to Unanticipated Discoveries: Ethical Lessons from iBlastoids"

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 4. Citizen Expertise and Citizen Action in the Creation of the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NSEC - Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU

  NSF · $7.2M · 2010–2016

• Science Advanced through Virtual Institutes (SAVI): Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation

  NSF · $498k · 2013–2017

• Collaborative Research: Workshop on the Anticipatory Governance of Complex Engineered Nanomaterials, July 1, 2012 - June 30, 2014

  NSF · $34k · 2012–2016

• NSEC: Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University

  NSF · $6.3M · 2005–2012

Frequent coauthors

• Jathan Sadowski

  Monash University

  21 shared

• Erik Fisher

  Institute for the Future

  10 shared

• William C. Clark

  Harvard University

  10 shared

• Hervé Chneiweiss

  Neurosciences Paris-Seine

  10 shared

• Nancy M. Dickson

  Volkswagen Foundation

  10 shared

• Emma Frow

  Arizona State University

  9 shared

• Mahmud Farooque

  Institute for the Future

  8 shared

• Cynthia Selin

  Arizona State University

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1993

• B.A.

  Yale University

  1987

• Other

  Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

  1993

Awards & honors

• 2002 Don K. Price Prize by the American Political Science As…