Today, I talk to four rising researchers who bring science, technology, and society analysis to bear on COVID-19.  Tim Schutz, Prerna Srigyan, Maka Suarez, and Pedro de la Torre III.
 
Pedro de la Torre III is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and an Adjunct Instructor in the Humanities Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research focuses on competing relations to place and history, as well as current and future land use, in contaminated spaces. He explored these issues ethnographically in my dissertation, “Unmaking Wastelands: Inheriting Waste, War, and Futures at the Hanford Site.” Pedro recently completed a PhD program in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
 
Tim Schütz is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Together with Kim Fortun, Scott G. Knowles and Jason Ludwig, he co-developed the project Quotidian Anthropocenes. He is also a member of the design group for the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE).  In the COVID project, he focuses on a critical analysis of existing civic data tools to track the impact of the pandemic. Most recently, he began examining activist data archives responding to the Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics, currently expanding its operations in Louisiana's “Cancer Alley.”
 
Prerna Srigyan is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine. She studied Environment & Development at Ambedkar University Delhi and Chemistry from the University of Delhi. Since 2017, she has worked as a Researcher in The Asthma Files (TAF) project (also hosted by PECE) where she continues to develop her Master's research on science and advocacy around Delhi's air pollution. Her research interests are transnational science networks, science pedagogy and politics of collaboration. In the COVID project, she listens to understand how transnational STS collaborations work in practice. 
 
Maka Suarez is co-founder of Kaleidos-Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography and assistant professor at the University of Cuenca in southern Ecuador. She is currently working on the design of a cross-disciplinary digital platform that combines ethnographic material with data analysis called EthnoData. The plan is to continue to expand this platform and include COVID19 related issues this year.