The Fourth International Conference on Science in Society at the University of California Berkeley will feature plenary sessions by Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné, Kayte Spector-Bagdady, Paul Lombardo and Stephen Birch, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners. See below for a short bio of each plenary speaker, for more details click here.

BERNARD SINCLAIR-DESGAGNÉ
Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné is the International Economics and Governance chair and Chairman of the International Business department at HEC Montréal, a Fellow of CIRANO and an Affiliate Professor at the École polytechnique of Paris. Previously, he was for several years a faculty member of INSEAD (in Fontainebleau, France) and the École polytechnique of Montreal. He holds a PhD in Management science/Operations research from Yale University. His main research areas are the economics of incentives and organization, environmental economics and policy, risk management, and environmental innovation. His recent work focuses on the dynamics of the eco-industry, the administrative costs of environmental regulation, and policy making under scientific uncertainty.

KAYTE SPECTOR-BAGDADY
Kayte Spector-Bagdady received her BA from Middlebury College. After working several years as a legal assistant, she attended the University of Pennsylvania where she received a JD from the Law School and a Master of Bioethics from the School of Medicine. Her interests include reproductive and pharmaceutical ethics, and she has published articles on issues such as direct-to-consumer advertising, informed consent in posthumous reproduction, and patient screening practices for assisted reproductive technologies.

PAUL LOMBARDO
Paul earned both his Ph.D. and J.D. degrees from the University of Virginia where he was a faculty member of the Schools of Law and Medicine and director of the Center for Mental Health Law at the Int. of Law, Psychiatry & Public Policy. He currently serves as Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta. In 2002, he sponsored an historical marker to memorialize the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 decision endorsing eugenical sterilization laws in Buck v. Bell. His advocacy for state governmental repudiation of past eugenic policies succeeded first in Virginia and has extended to six other states. His publications span the fields of health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics and include the books: “A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era” (ed., 2011), “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell” (2008), and “Fletcher’s Clinical Ethics” (ed., 2005).

STEPHEN BIRCH
Stephen Birch is a Professor in The Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis at McMaster University in Canada and Chair in Health Economics at the University of Manchester. He is senior scientist at the WHO Collaborating Centre on Health Workforce Planning at Dalhousie University, Canada and a member of the UK Department of Health’s Centre for Workforce Intelligence. His main research interests are in the economics of health care systems with particular emphasis on equity, resource allocation and alternative delivery models. He has over 200 publications in peer reviewed journals and recently completed a 15 year term as Senior Editor for Social Science and Medicine.