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William Sims Bainbridge

Williams Sims Bainbridge is the author of 17 scientific books, about 200 shorter works, and a number of software programs in the social science of technology and other fields. After earning his doctorate from Harvard University, with a dissertation about the space program, he taught sociology at the University of Washington and other universities for twenty years before joining the National Science Foundation to run its sociology program. In the year 2000, he moved over to NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, where he currently is a grant program officer in the area of Human-Centered Computing For many years he represented the social sciences on the major inter-agency high-technology finding initiatives, from Higher Performance Computing and Communications to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. He has played leading roles in the two most important efforts to anticipate the societal implications of nanotechnology, and in four related projects charting the potential for transformation of science and engineering by the unification of the "NBIC" fields: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based on cognitive science.