University of Edinburgh (Scotland)

The University of Edinburgh is an established home to many ideas that are cognate with Public Interest Technology. The Department of Science, Technology & Innovation Studies will act as a hub for our work in this area. The department traces its origins back to 1966 and is an international centre of excellence for
research and teaching in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which examines historical, social and political dimensions of science and technology, in addition to the ways in which they can be governed in democratic societies. Multidisciplinary programmes of research and teaching in the social, political,
environmental and cultural dimensions of science are now widespread throughout the university. This is represented in our application to join PIT-UN, which assembles staff from the School of Social and Political Sciences,  the School of Informatics, and Edinburgh Medical School. As described in the next section, there are a number of changes happening within our university, which
present particular opportunities to advance the field of Public Interest Technology, and that interaction with PIT-UN members would help us to capitalise on. We have a number of on-going informal relationships with staff at Berkeley, UIC, Cornell, Princeton, Columbia, U.of Virginia, MIT. We also have active collaborations with several other PIT-UN members.