Makoto Takahashi

Makoto Takahashi is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department for STS, TU Munich and recently completed a Fulbright-Lloyd's Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society (2022). His core interests lie in how societies come to understand technological risks and how they decide who can credibly inform policy. He received his BA, MPhil, and PhD from the University of Cambridge, writing his thesis on how expert authority is claimed and contested in conditions of low public trust. This project drew upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in Japan following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, and won the American Association of Geographers’ Jacques May Thesis Prize. Makoto has previously held a Visiting Fellowship at Waseda University (2017) and a Science and Technology Studies (STS) Fellowship at Harvard University (2019), as well as a Lectureship at TU Munich (2020-2022). He is currently curating a photography exhibit that explores the legacy of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and won the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology's (EASST) 2022 Ziman Award for Public Engagement. Picturing the Invisible is open at the Heong Gallery, Cambridge until April 23, 2023.