past event

Center on Nanotechnology and Society
1st Annual Nanopolicy Conference
Nanoworld: Toward a Policy for the Human Future

Christine Peterson

Christine Peterson is Founder and Vice President of Public Policy for Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. Foresight educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects. She writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology.

Peterson serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology, the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on California's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology.

In 2004, she chaired the 1st Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology: Research, Applications, and Policy. For many years, she directed the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organized the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes, and chaired the Foresight Vision Weekends.

She lectures on nanotechnology to a wide variety of audiences, focusing on making this complex field understandable, and on clarifying the difference between near-term commercial advances and the "next industrial revolution" arriving in the next few decades.

Her work is motivated by a desire to help earth's environment and traditional human communities avoid harm and instead benefit from expected dramatic advances in technology. This goal of spreading benefits led to an interest in new varieties of intellectual property, including open source software, a term she is credited with originating.

In 1991, she coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution, which sketches nanotechnology's potential environmental and medical benefits, as well as possible abuses. An interest in group process led to coauthoring Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (knOwhere Press, 1997) with Gayle Pergamit.

Christine holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry from MIT.