Gene I. Rochlin (armsis@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Gene I. Rochlin is Professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a B.S. in 1960, M.S. in 1961, and Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Chicago, all in Physics. After teaching physics at Berkeley for several years, he retrained in political science as an advanced post-doctoral scholar at MIT and Harvard in the mid-1970s. His research interests include science, technology and society, cultural and cognitive studies of technical operations, the politics and policy of energy and environmental matters, and the broader cultural, organizational and social implications and consequences of technology – including large technical systems. He was a principle of the Berkeley High Reliability Project, a multidisciplinary team that has studied the organizational aspects of safety-critical systems such as nuclear power and air traffic control; his portion of that research includes comparative, cross-national studies on the management, regulation and control of large, complex, high-technology organizations performing socially critical functions. Most recently he has been involved with several studies that seek to apply methods, approaches, and theories from a broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences to a variety of problems and issues arising from the widespread use of complex, sophisticated technologies and technical systems. He is also the principal investigator of an NSF grant training young scholars in a broad range of analytic methods and approaches to studying the social and political dimensions of science and technology.
Prof. Rochlin’s recent book Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization (Princeton: 1997), which focuses on the effects of computer-based technology on various organizations and institutions in modern societies, won the 1999 Don K. Price Award of the Science, Technology and Environmental Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He also co-edits a series on science, technology and the environment for the MIT Press, and is on the editorial board of several journals. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Expanded information on his research, publications, and instruction are available at: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~rochlin/