Jennifer Kuzma PhD: Goodnight-NCGSK Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs, and co-founder and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society (GES) Center at NC State University.
Prior to her current position, she was associate professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota (2003-2013); study director at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM); and an AAAS Risk Policy Fellow at the USDA. She has over 140 scholarly publications on emerging technologies, their societal and ethical implications, and governance systems and has been studying these areas for over 25 years. Kuzma has held several national and international leadership positions, including a member of the World Economic Forum Council on Technology, Values and Policy; the NASEM Committee on Preparing for Future Biotechnology, Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) Council Member and Secretary, FAO Expert Group on Food and Nanotechnology, Council of Agricultural Science and Technology Committee on Gene Editing, and the AAAS-ABA National Council of Scientists and Lawyers. In 2014, she received the SRA Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer Award for her contributions to the field of risk analysis and in 2017-2018 she was awarded the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Science Policy. In 2019 she was elected a lifetime Fellow of AAAS for her distinguished work in anticipatory governance of new technologies, and methods for oversight policy analysis. She has given over 200 invited talks and is interviewed frequently in the media for her expertise in biotechnology policy, including the New York Times, Science, The Scientist, Nature, NPR, Washington Post, Scientific American, BBC, PBS Nova, Wired, and ABC & NBC News. Prior to becoming a social scientist and policy scholar, she earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry at UC-Boulder and did a postdoc in plant molecular biology at Rockefeller University. During her PhD, she was the first to discover that bacteria produce isoprene, a precursor to natural rubber. Bacterial isoprene (Bioisoprene) is now being used for more sustainable rubber production. Her postdoctoral work helped to identify a biochemical and molecular pathway for plant drought and salinity tolerance and resulted in a publication in Science.