David H. Guston is Foundation Professor in Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Associate Vice Provost for Discovery, Engagement and Outcomes in ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
Guston is widely published and cited on research and development policy, technology assessment, public participation in science and technology, and the governance of emerging technologies. His work has defined, articulated and explored such crucial concepts as boundary organizations, responsible innovation, and anticipatory governance, and his ideas about them have been incorporated into governmental and non-government organizations and research programs in many parts of the world. His sole-authored Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research (Cambridge U. Press, 2000) won the 2002 Don K. Price Prize of the American Political Science Association for best book in science and technology policy. His most recent book, co-edited with ASU colleagues Ed Finn and Jason Robert, is a bicentennial edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017), which was reviewed across publications ranging from Science to The New York Review of Books, and was selected as a “one book” read at Colorado College, among other places. Creative outputs from the overall “Frankenstein Bicentennial Project” Guston led with Finn include a digital edition of the book in collaboration with MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, the 2017 version of ASU’s Emerge: A Festival of Futures that Guston executive-produced, various musical, theatrical and film event, and a monstrous garden of cacti with cancer on permanent exhibition at ASU.
After earning his bachelor of arts, cum laude, from Yale, Guston received his PhD in political science from MIT. He was a pre- and then post-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he worked closely with Lewis Branscomb on innovation policy and also with Bill Clark on global environmental assessments. He spent nearly eleven years on the faculty at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he helped create and lead the master of public policy program and served as director of the public policy program for several years.
After receiving tenure at Rutgers, Guston took a sabbatical in Washington, DC, helping Dan Sarewitz launch the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO), which was conceived and chaired by Columbia University’s then-executive vice provost Michael Crow. After Crow became president of ASU, the renamed Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes left Washington, DC for Arizona. Guston joined Sarewitz there, and the ambitious agenda they established led CSPO to be named among the top S&T policy think tanks in the world consistently since that time.
While at ASU, Guston has been principal investigator on nearly $15M in awards from the US National Science Foundation – including the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU and the Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation – and co-investigator on another $7M. In 2015, President Crow asked him to create a School for the Future of Innovation in Society, which he led until 2021. In 2020, he was appointed Associate Vice Provost in the recently created Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL). In this role, he is broadly responsible for the research, public engagement and impact mission of GFL in its university-wide operations, including leading a task force on designing GFL as a mission-oriented academic organization for impact and outcomes.
Guston was the North American editor of Science and Public Policy and the founding editor of the Journal of Responsible Innovation. He served on the National Academy of Engineering's Steering Committee on Engineering Ethics and Society that created the Center for Engineering Ethics and Society, and he has testified to panels of the National Academies’ Board on Life Sciences, the Board on Higher Education and Workforce, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He served on the Regional Forum for Responsible Innovation for the region of Lombardy, Italy, and on the steering group for the creation of a Publicly Available Specification on responsible innovation (PAS 440) in conjunction with British Standards Institute in the UK. He currently serves on the advisory board to the OECD Committee on Scientific and Technological Policy’s project on “societies in times of crisis and beyond.” He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.