The faculty at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies (iSTS) undertake research on how science and technology has shaped, and is shaping, our world. Its researchers apply the social sciences and humanities’ most advanced methods and theories to long-standing and emerging questions about technoscience. Based on the understanding gained through these investigations we develop enlightened science policy to help guide communities and nations as they respond to persistent technological and scientific challenges.

By bringing together leading Canadian and international scholars, iSTS researches science and technology’s structure and methods, history and future, and interrelations with politics, economics and culture. iSTS reflects the interdisciplinary nature of its research area by drawing participating researchers from across York University’s Faculties of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Health, and Science & Engineering.

Science and technology play an enormous role in defining the modern world. Every dimension of life today is shaped by scientific and technological factors, in both evident and unexpected ways: from the role of pervasive computing technology in scientific research and everyday life, to the function of medical science in reproduction and care; from the centrality of physics and chemistry in modern warfare to the ways in which new astronomical discoveries lead us to rethink the nature of the universe and our place within it. iSTS draws on a broad and well-developed scholarly community at York to foster leading-edge research into these pressing issues.

With twenty active faculty members and a growing body of graduate students, iSTS researchers have a range of strengths in areas including the history of Enlightenment and Victorian science, earth and space science, medicine and disease, nanotechnology and wearable technology, psychology, and biology. The Institute Director, Bernard Lightman, is the editor of Isis, the official publication of the History of Science Society, and the oldest and most widely-circulated English-language journal in the field. iSTS is also home to a number of groundbreaking collaborative research projects.

Our header image is adapted from one produced by the European Southern Observatory, and depicts part of its Paranal Observatory’s adaptive optics system. We use it here under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which the ESO generously applies to most of the images it produces. You can find out more about this image from the ESO and from Wikimedia Commons, where it was selected as Picture of the Year for 2010.