Elections for 2026 opens Tuesday, June 30th 2026, and will remain open for three weeks.
The Elections Committee is pleased to present the candidates for the 2026 election. This year there are 2 candidates for President-elect, 1 candidate for Treasurer, 1 candidate for 6S, and 10 candidates for 4S council. You will receive a link in your inbox to cast your virtual ballot (using SurveyMonkey). Please check your junk email or spam folder and if you have any trouble, please contact info@4sonline.org. Voting is now open and will close on Tuesday, July 21st at 11:59 PM (Pacific time).
You need to be a 4S member to vote. To renew or create a membership click on the link below. We will then send you an email within one week of your membership renewal and within 24 hours of the end of the election.
President-elect Nomination
Name: Gwen Ottinger
Role: Professor | Department of Politics | Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science | Center for Science, Technology and Society
Statement: Gwen Ottinger is a professor of politics and environmental studies and affiliate of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Drexel University. Their research investigates the consequences of science, technology, and expertise for social and environmental justice, in part through research collaborations with frontline communities and non-profit organizations. Their work has been supported by an NSF CAREER grant, an ACLS-Burkhardt Fellowship, and a Fulbright Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. Ottinger has found an intellectual home in STS since they were an undergraduate engineering major; their first book, Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges (NYU, 2013), was awarded the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize. Ottinger has since contributed to 4S as a Council member, Publications Committee chair, member of the Edge, Carson, and Infrastructure prize committees, and regular participant in the 4S mentoring program. Their leadership experience includes managing the redesign of the undergraduate STS curriculum at the University of Washington-Bothell, directing the Environmental Studies and Sustainability B.A. at Drexel, and spearheading a multi-disciplinary effort to make refinery fenceline air quality data accessible to communities and researchers. Ottinger aims to engage STEM practitioners, policy-makers, and engaged members of the public with their work, including their latest book, The Science of Repair: How People who Believe in Facts Can Build a Better Future (Oxford, 2026), as well as recent pieces in Undark, Science Politics, and Issues in Science and Technology. If elected, they would work on building the capacity of 4S and its members to bring STS insight into public debates in diverse political contexts and look for ways the Society can make its practices more environmentally sustainable.
President-elect Nomination
Name: Shobita Parthasarathy
Role: Professor, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
Statement: I am Professor of Public Policy and Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, at University of Michigan, USA. I received my PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University. My work focuses on the politics of knowledge and expertise in public policymaking, and the social, equity, and political dimensions of technological innovation and innovation policy—in cross-national and global perspective. I have published widely in STS journals and written two books: Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press) and Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press). I am completing my third book, which focuses on the politics of inclusive innovation with a focus on sanitation and menstruation in India. I frequently translate STS ideas to the public and policymakers; this includes testifying to the US Congress, writing a regular Expert Voices column in Science magazine, and co-hosting The Received Wisdom podcast.
I have a strong and abiding commitment to 4S. As a graduate student, I was elected as the Student Representative to the 4S Council. In this position I established the STSGRAD listserv and worked with colleagues to create the Student Section of 4S (6S). Since then, I have remained an active member of the Society, and served on the 4S Council from 2014-2017. I sat on the editorial board of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (2015-2020) and have served on the Science, Technology, and Human Values editorial board since 2022. In summer 2026, I was the keynote instructor at the STHV STS Summer School in Seoul. If I am elected 4S President, I aim to build on my predecessors’ work to strengthen the organization for the next 50 years. I also continue my dedication to supporting junior scholars. Finally, I believe it is important for STS to inform the most serious questions of our time. Particularly at a moment when the humanities and social sciences are under attack at universities across the world, I believe that 4S can play an important role in supporting colleagues, demonstrating how STS thinking is crucial for societies to realize better futures, and cultivating new STS concepts to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
Treasurer Nomination
Name: Lee Vinsel
Statement: Lee Vinsel is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and host of Peoples & Things, a podcast about human life with technology. He is the author of two books and many articles, and his work has appeared or been covered in major outlets around the world, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Le Monde, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition to managing grants throughout his career, Vinsel co-founded and, for seven years, co-directed The Maintainers, a global, interdisciplinary research network focused on maintenance, repair, care, and the mundane work that keeps the world going. The Maintainers was funded by the Sloan Foundation and the Siegel Family Endowment, and co-directing the organization involved project and task management, managing budgets, hiring staff, paying research fellows, reviewing contracts, and organizing and paying for conferences. Vinsel heartily supports and agrees to adhere to 4S's Ethics and Code of Conduct policy. The Maintainers was an early adopter of a thoroughgoing code of conduct for its gatherings, and Vinsel has written and spoken about the damages of bullying, harassment, and emotional abuse in academic contexts and how organizations can work to avoid and heal such harms. Vinsel is a US citizen based in the US (a requirement of the Treasurer position), and he is ready and available for regular council meetings.
6S Nomination
Name: Brian Thomas
Statement: Brian bridges the gap between graduate student and early career faculty. He is both a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM), and an Instructor of Statistics at OSF Healthcare - Saint Anthony's College of Nursing. This gives him a vested interest in advocating for both populations the 6S board represents. He has been instrumental in developing annual research symposia from 2023 to 2026 for UWM’s Digital Cultures Collaboratory (DCC) and the UWM Anthropology Student Union. He was a key organizer for the DCC/UWM Honor’s College joint D&DEI event in 2023. Further, his work as technical director of the DCC has focused on programing examining the value of analog and digital games, creating a platform to have academic discussions of popular games, as well as ways to incorporate social theory, and academic tools (such as Geographic Information Systems) into the management and play of games like Dungeons and Dragons (through the series Handy DM Tips, and Handy DM Tools). Additionally, he has managed the programing schedule and technical production of other student programs. Further, he has used his expertise in games to build programs focused on motivating youth and young adults to engage with one another while highlighting the value of community resources like public libraries, and high school activities facilities. Brian has broad academic background with advanced degrees in Emergency Management, Sociology, and Anthropology (pending), and navigates between these disciplines and across their literature. He regularly mentors both graduate student peers, and his own students across these disciplines in academic planning, program/event development, qualitative and quantitative ethics, and statistical sampling, modeling, and interpretation. His research crosses disciplinary fields examining the use of popular cultural products such as games and television programing to promote access, and growth of mental health as well as critique institutional systems that limit, or guide opportunities for research and treatment. This research is supported by grants from the UIC/OSF Healthcare Innovation Incubator Community Health Access Grant (CHA), and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Initiative (PCORI). He has presented his work at both academic and professional conferences ranging from 4S and the American Anthropological Association to professional events like the Therapeutic + Applied Geek + Gaming Summit, Gamehole Con, and the now annual community gaming convention LyonCon (where he was co-founder) with presentations ranging from the use of games as clinical mental health tools, to the illusion of authority represented by the referees in professional wrestling, to the safe and ethical instruction of quantitative methods in introductory statistics courses.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Kean Birch
Current Post: Professor/Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy
Statement: I am Co-Chair of the Toronto 2026 4S Conference, as well as Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy and Professor in the Department of Science, Technology & Society at York University, Canada. I also co-founded and was inaugural Director of the Institute for Technoscience & Society at York University and am Co-Editor of the journal Science as Culture. Generally, my research sits at the interface between STS and political economy, especially when it comes to the study of assets and assetization. I am interested in joining 4S Council in order to support ongoing efforts at transnationalizing STS as a discipline and 4S as a global learned society. It is evident that STS has enormous potential to contribute to addressing a range of global challenges, and we can take proactive steps to ensure that insights from STS inform the direction and implications of scientific and technological developments. 4S can play an important role here in mobilizing the knowledge and research of its members in this regard and engaging with a range of rightsholders in the pursuit of a technoscience not beholden to a small clique of billionaires and their political allies. As a member of 4S Council, I would want to promote this sort of public, policy, and political engagement globally.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Javier Guerrero-C
Role: Lecturer, Institución Universitaria ITM, Masters in STSStatement: I’m currently a Lecturer at the Institutions Universitaria ITM, Medellín, Colombia, where I teach Science, Technology and Society and research methods for STS. I studied Sociology in Colombia, where I was born, and soon started working at the Colombian Observatory of Science and Technology Studies. I then moved to Edinburgh (UK) to undertake postgraduate studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies under the direction of Robin Williams. My doctoral research focused on the production of innovation in the War on Drugs in Colombia. This work was the basis for the book Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs (Palgrave, 2019). From there, my interests have moved to a broader understanding of the circulation and production of knowledge in 'grey areas'. I am currently editing the Handbook of Knowledge and Practices in the Gray Areas (Edward Elgar, due in 2028). In addition to my interest in the 'grey zones of knowledge and technology production', over the last few years I have focused on several topics related to digital STS, such as the circulation of conspiracy theories in social networks, analysing the particular context of Latin America, as well as the promises of digitalisation for health and the promises of Artificial Intelligence. I have published several articles on these topics. I have been involved in the Colombian Network of STS and served as a member of the Directive Committee of the Latin American Association for the Social Studies of Science and Technology (ESOCITE) 2023–2025, and was chosen to serve as liaison between the outgoing and current boards of ESOCITE. I am currently a member of the Organizing Committee of the XVI Jornadas ESOCITE. I was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. If elected to the 4S Council, I want to enhance the Society's internationalisation efforts, especially by incorporating a perspective from the Global South in the production of knowledge. I will also promote a closer relationship between 4S and ESOCITE, finding ways to enrich collaboration between the associations and, more broadly, to enrich science, technology and society theory and practice.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Santosh Kumar
Role: Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Delhi (4S Member)
Statement: I am writing to express my interest in serving as a Council Member of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). As an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi, I see this role as an opportunity to contribute to 4S’s ongoing efforts toward global inclusion, intellectual diversity, and support for emerging scholars. My engagement with 4S over the past three years—beginning with the Annual Meeting in Honolulu (2023)—has been both sustained and multi-layered. I have participated as a presenter, volunteer, panel organizer, and member of the Travel Grant Committee (Seattle 2025). Through these roles, I have gained a grounded understanding of the organizational and collaborative work that sustains 4S, particularly its commitments to accessibility, mentorship, and internationalization. During this period, I have also had the opportunity to work closely and interact with members of the 4S community, including Amanda Windle, Amit Prasad, Rohit Negi, Misria, Nicole Nelson, Timothy Neale, Noela Invernizzi, Shiv Issar, and Grant Jun Otsuki. These interactions—through organizing, reviewing, and collaborative spaces—have helped me better understand the collective ethos of 4S and the importance of distributed, international academic labor. My institutional location offers a distinct pathway to further the goals of 4S. At the University of Delhi, where nearly a thousand undergraduate students are enrolled in the Sociology Department, I am actively involved in shaping how students encounter STS. I teach sociology of science and have consistently encouraged students to engage with 4S—both by sharing my own participation and by mentoring them toward conference involvement. Many students have directly approached me to learn more about 4S, indicating the growing interest in the field. Significantly, I have contributed to designing and introducing a Sociology of Science syllabus at the University of Delhi—marking the first time such a course is being systematically taught across the university. This initiative institutionalizes STS within one of India’s largest higher education systems and creates a sustained pipeline of students who can engage with 4S in the future. My research lies at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, sociology of medicine, and sociology of education, with a focus on how scientific knowledge is produced and negotiated across laboratory and everyday contexts. I am particularly committed to expanding STS conversations through Global South perspectives. As reflected in 4S annual reports, the society continues to emphasize global participation, accessibility, and support for early-career scholars. From my position in India, I believe I can contribute meaningfully by strengthening connections with South Asian academic communities, mentoring new entrants into STS, and supporting inclusive participation in 4S activities. I see the role of a Council Member as one of facilitation and stewardship—helping to build bridges across regions, institutions, and scholarly communities. I would be honored to contribute to the collective work of 4S in this capacity.
Name: Qiushi Xu
Role: Assistant professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
Statement: Dr. Qiushi Xu is a prominent young scholar in Sound Studies. She is one of the few students of Trevor Pinch on sound studies. She is a good academic organizer, and I believe she will contribute to 4S with a new style of force. Here is the link to her official webpage.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Wanheng Hu
Role: Embedded Ethics Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
I am an incoming Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Peking University in Beijing. I received my PhD in STS from Cornell University in 2024 and am currently an Embedded Ethics Fellow at Stanford University, jointly appointed at the Center for Ethics in Society and the Institute for Human-Centered AI. My research examines artificial intelligence (AI) as a site of knowledge production in highly specialized expert domains, with a particular focus on medical AI in China. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in China’s medical AI industry, I analyze how machine learning systems in radiology reconfigure medical expertise, and how their credibility is negotiated across industrial, regulatory, and clinical settings. My work has appeared in venues including Public Understanding of Science and The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning. The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) has been central to my intellectual growth and scholarly identity over the past decade. I was first introduced to 4S at its 2015 annual meeting in Denver, when I traveled to the United States for the first time as a master’s student. There, I encountered a community of passionate, thoughtful, and generous STS scholars, including many whose work had shaped the field and several who later became my advisors. Since then, I have regularly presented my research, organized panels, and, just as importantly, built lasting friendships. It is this combination of intellectual engagement and community that motivates my interest in serving on the Council and giving back to the scholarly community that has shaped my own path in STS. If elected, I would be particularly interested in supporting workshops, summer schools, and other collaborative initiatives that create opportunities for graduate students and early-career STS scholars to participate more actively in the broader 4S community.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Tim Schütz
Role: Independent Researcher, EcoGovLab, University of California, Irvine
Statement: I write to offer my candidacy for 4S Council. My priorities, if elected, would be strengthening the Society's transnational connections and deepening the digital infrastructures that support collaborative STS scholarship. Over the years, I have worked both as a researcher studying knowledge infrastructure and actively helped build it, from research collectives to editorial roles. I look forward to bringing both of those strands to the Society's work. The transnational dimension of STS has deeply shaped my own career and would be central to my work on the Council. I began my scholarly formation within STS labs and graduate programs in Germany before completing my PhD in the United States, during which I built extensive working relationships with STS communities across East Asia. This trajectory has also meant years of direct engagement with 4S itself, through design work for the 4S Awards, a Making & Doing video, and service as Open Data Editor for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, giving me a working understanding of how the Society functions from the inside. My dissertation examined the development of knowledge practices and infrastructures among environmental activists responding to the operations of Formosa Plastics Corporation across Taiwan, the United States, and Vietnam. Working across these sites, I studied different data practices and ideologies, and explored opportunities for linkages between people and places facing shared environmental injustice challenges. This work brought me into collaboration with organizations led by grassroots leaders and community members. The challenge of building infrastructure that is genuinely useful across different communities, cultures, and data practices is one I hope to bring to the Council's work. I am also enthusiastic about supporting the upcoming 4S conference in Taipei. Two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan have allowed me to build lasting connections with local scholars, institutions, and communities. I would welcome the opportunity to help shape additional programming around the conference, focused on Taiwan's contemporary technological and environmental challenges. Possible activities might include visits to institutions dedicated to Taiwan's authoritarian period and democratization, as well as tours of corporate museums documenting the petrochemical and high-technology development that has shaped the island. For such programming, I would draw on my relationships with the local STS community as well as undergraduate and graduate students I have mentored. Finally, serving on the Council would allow me to expand and deepen digital infrastructures that support open data sharing, new forms of scholarly analysis, and broader communication across the field. Since 2018, I have been a member of the Design Group for the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), serving as outreach coordinator, leading user workshops, and managing communications with a global research community. I have also served as administrator for several PECE instances, including the Disaster-STS Network and STS Infrastructures, overseeing workflows for data management, content organization, and long-term archival strategy. As a recent recipient of a Marie Curie Action Fellowship, I will be a postdoctoral researcher at IT University, which will allow me to sustain the transnational scope of this work while serving on Council.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Lisa Lazarus
Role: Assistant Professor, University of Manitoba
Statement: I am an Early Career Researcher and Assistant Professor in the Institute for Global Public Health and College of Community and Global Health at the University of Manitoba (since December 2023). I have co-led community-based research initiatives since 2009 and have partnered with community-led organizations in Kenya, India, and Canada, with extensive experience in conducting collaborative project ethnographies within community settings. My research focuses on democratizing community-based research approaches across the HIV sciences. My work is especially interested in how recent and dramatic decreases in HIV-related funding globally and rises in policies that criminalize marginalized populations are threatening gains made in community-led interventions. At the same time, current responses to the HIV epidemic have largely shifted towards biomedical and technocratic approaches—from different modalities of pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent HIV and mathematical modeling to set funding priorities. To respond to this, I have been co-leading a series of community-directed technoscientific studies with an aim of bridging the divide between activist and research spaces, in collaboration with community leaders at the forefront of Kenya’s HIV response. At this critical juncture in global public health, I am especially interested in what it mean to do “community-based” HIV research? This work expands on my previous analytic work critically examining how we define "success" in global public health interventions. My PhD research focused on an ethnographic study of an HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis demonstration project led by the sex worker collective Ashodaya Samithi in Mysore, India. That work built on 10 years of collaboration with the organization and highlighted the crucial role that communities play in shaping and achieving success in the implementation of biomedical health interventions. It is this lens at the intersect of applied public health and the social studies of science that I would bring as a 4S Council Member.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Youjung Shin
Role: Associate Professor
Statement: I am an associate professor in the Department of Science Studies at Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, South Korea. My research focuses on the valuation processes of knowledge infrastructures, specifically how data infrastructures shape the production and circulation of science and technology. Drawing on a historical STS perspective, I explore the dynamic intersection of computerization and biomedicalization within neuroscience, exemplified by the rise of transnational human brain projects in the late 20th century. My work aims to reveal the underlying material and social conditions that embed specific values into scientific and technological knowledge. Currently, I am translating these STS insights into the realm of science and technology policy – particularly under the framework of “Science, Technology, and Value Policy (STVP).” My recent projects cover the evolution of mind and brain sciences, the politics of neurotechnologies, the valuation of biomedical data infrastructures, post–Cold War international collaboration big science, and the pluralism of governance in emerging science and technology. My research has been featured in journals such as History of the Human Sciences, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Minerva, Novation, Journal of Science and Technology Studies, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and etc. My commitment to the field is reflected in my service as a Research Committee Member for the Korean Association of Science and Technology Studies and as an Organizing Committee Member for the Korean History of Science Society. More globally, I have contributed to the international academic community as a Book Review Board Member for East Asian Science, Technology and Society and have served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences since 2021. Extending my expertise beyond the academic community, I serve on the Committee on Science Culture Broadcasting at the Korea Foundation for Science and Creativity (KOFAC). Additionally, I am an Executive Committee Member specializing in science policy at the Young Korean Academy of Science and Technology (Y-KAST). In these capacities, I strive to bridge the gap between STS scholarship and real-world practice, translating theoretical insights into actionable science policy and public engagement.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Lu Gao
Role: Associated Professor, Tsinghua University
Statement: I am an Associate Professor at the STS Center, Tsinghua University. From 2011 to 2026, I worked at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where I served as Director of the STS Center and helped build interdisciplinary academic platforms. My training and visiting appointments at the University of Edinburgh, Stanford University, and the University of Kent have situated my work within a transnational STS network. My research examines the history and governance of emerging biotechnologies, focusing on how responsibility, ethical frameworks, and governance capacities are formed within scientific practice. My earlier work, including a book on the Scientific Revolution and British Modernization, explored science, modernity, and social transformation. My recent empirical research focuses on biotechnology governance, including gene editing, genomics, synthetic biology. I have contributed a forthcoming chapter on science policy in China to Edward Elgar’s Research Handbook on the Sociology of Science and Technology, and organized special issues on Humanizing RRI in the Journal of Responsible Innovation and Global Governance of Technological Ethics in Cultures of Science. More recently, I have turned to AI’s impact on scientific research, especially how AI reshapes laboratory life, scientific responsibility, and human roles in knowledge production; I am planning a book on laboratory life in the age of AI.
My connection with 4S began at the 4S Conference in Tokyo in 2010 and has continued through subsequent 4S and STS meetings. I have also served in STS-related committees and professional associations in China. If elected to the 4S Council, I would work to strengthen exchanges between 4S and Chinese, East Asian, and other underrepresented STS communities. I would promote conversations on biotechnology, frontier life sciences, and AI, and help bring China’s recent governance experiments into wider empirical and theoretical discussion. I would also explore opportunities for future 4S-related events in China or East Asia, supporting 4S as a genuinely global intellectual community.
4S Council Nomination
Name: Yuna Lee
Role: Postdoctoral Researcher
Statement: I am applying for a position as a Council Member of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) because I strongly identify with its mission to advance critical, interdisciplinary scholarship on the relationships between science, technology, and society. My academic trajectory, rooted in political science and shaped through sustained engagement with science and technology studies (STS), policy studies, and historical analysis, positions me to contribute meaningfully to the intellectual and institutional life of 4S. I recently completed my PhD at University College London, where my doctoral research examined the evolution of anticipatory governance through a comparative historical analysis of British and American approaches to national emergency planning from the Cold War to the present. By tracing how scientific knowledge, political priorities, and institutional frameworks have interacted to produce strategies of foresight, my work engages directly with core STS concerns, particularly the co-production of knowledge, expertise, and governance. While historical in method, my research is oriented toward contemporary challenges, especially in a context defined by uncertainty, complex risks, and the increasing importance of long-term policy thinking. While I completed my PhD only a few months ago and am at an early stage of my academic career, my trajectory has been shaped by a deliberately broad and interdisciplinary path. Prior to academia, my background spanned finance, where I worked as an industry analyst and new business planner. Combined with earlier training in creative fields, this has allowed me to approach research with an unusually wide range of perspectives. This breadth is not incidental; it reflects a sustained commitment to developing my capacities holistically across analytical, institutional, and creative domains. This combination informs my approach to research today: one attentive not only to theoretical and historical depth, but also to how knowledge is produced, translated, and mobilized across sectors and communities. Strategic foresight is often situated within futures studies, with scholars such as Wendell Bell (at Yale University) shaping the field. My approach, however, is grounded in political and institutional history. I analyse how anticipatory frameworks were constructed across the twentieth century through interactions among scientific, economic, and political actors. I am motivated to contribute to 4S as a space that fosters inclusive and globally engaged intellectual exchange. Having conducted research across the United Kingdom and the United States, I bring an international perspective to strengthen dialogue across regions, disciplines, and career stages. I am especially committed to supporting early career researchers through mentorship, collaboration, and meaningful participation within the 4S community. I see 4S as uniquely positioned to expand critical conversations around anticipatory governance, expertise, and the role of knowledge in policymaking. I am eager to help shape these discussions, ensuring they remain both theoretically rigorous and socially relevant. I am particularly interested in bridging historically grounded research with forward-looking policy debates and supporting initiatives that connect academic inquiry with real-world challenges. As a Council Member, I would take an active role in strengthening interdisciplinary exchange, promoting inclusivity, and supporting the next generation of scholars. I am committed not only to participating in 4S, but to helping shape its future as a vibrant, diverse, and globally engaged intellectual community.