David Peterson

David Peterson received his PhD from Northwestern University and was a postdoc at UCLA before joining the sociology department at Purdue. He studies the nexus of scientific practice, emerging technologies, and expert authority. Currently, his work focuses on two topics. First, he studies how the organizations of science are evolving to meet a variety of threats including political pressure, intensifying global competition, new communications and machine learning technologies, and emerging regulatory and managerial bodies. Second, he investigates the production of science in areas that have had chronic legitimacy problems (like the social sciences) to shed light on the complex interactions between politics, expertise, and authority. 

Specializations: Science and technology, expertise, metascience, data and society, qualitative methods