Mike Fortun is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine (UCI). His research and teaching focus on  the histories, cultures and practices of different sciences, including the life sciences, environmental health sciences, psychoanalysis, and the interpretative social sciences.  

Fortun’s research has examined how scientists build and use research data infrastructure, how scientists present themselves and their projects, and how scientists collaborate with communities trying to address environmental harms.  Fortun’s publications include Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century (1998) (co-authored with physicist Herb Bernstein), Promising Genomics: Iceland and Decode Genetics in a World of Speculation (2008), and Genomics With Care: Minding the Double Binds of Science (2023). 

Fortun’s  current research includes an interdisciplinary study of beyond-the-tailpipe air pollution and knowledge-to-governance pathways  (collaborating with air chemists, health effects researchers and a community-based organization), and a study of ways air pollution has been visualized since the 1940s. 

From 1994-1998, Fortun was Executive Director of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (IS&IS), and continues to serve on the IS&IS Board. From 2005-2010, Fortun co-edited the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. Currently, Fortun is in the  design group for both The Asthma Files and World PECE. and co-directs the EcoGovLab. 

Fortun received a PhD from the Department of History of Science at Harvard University in 1993 then worked for over twenty years in an interdisciplinary department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He  moved  to UCI in 2017.

Learn more about Mike Fortun here.