Professor Harry Collins

Harry Collins is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise and Science (KES) at Cardiff University.  He has held visiting appointments in Brazil, China, California Institute of Technology, University of California at San Diego, Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, and many more.  He was awarded the 1997 Bernal prize for social studies of science. 

His sixteen books include two analyzing artificial intelligence published by MIT Press -- Artificial Experts (1990) and The Shape of Actions (1998).  Cambridge University Press published The Golem: What you should know about science (1993/98, with Trevor Pinch) which won the American Sociological Association’s Robert K Merton book prize and was followed by a volume on technology (1998).  University of Chicago Press have published seven of his books, including the 1992/85 Changing Order, Gravity’s Shadow: The search for gravitational waves (2004), Dr Golem: How to think about medicine (2005 with Trevor Pinch) Rethinking Expertise (2007 with Robert Evans), Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (2010), and Gravity’s Ghost: Scientific Discovery in the Twenty-First Century, (2011 forthcoming). 

Harry Collins is continuing his research on the sociology of gravitational wave detection, on the nature of expertise and on a new technique – the `Imitation Game’ – for exploring expertise and comparing the extent to which minority groups are integrated into societies.