David Demortain

Biography

David is a political scientist and sociologist based at the research centre Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), a centre of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), East-Paris University and CNRS. He is also a member of the Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation Société (IFRIS) and of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

His research broadly concerns the relationship between knowledge and regulation. It is driven by an abiding interest in understanding how the knowledge and competence of regulating or governing comes about – how do we know how to act on public problems? – especially in a context of governance in which multiple actors seek and claim to know how to intervene.

He is exploring various occurrences of this phenomenon, such as transnational regulatory concepts carried by experts (the topic of my book Scientists and the Regulation of Risk), the emergence of multi-domain regulatory instruments (e.g. risk assessment) or the transition towards a new regulatory toxicology. He coordinates a research program (INNOX – Innovation in Expertise) on model-based predictions in public policy, investigating predictive policing, energy scenarios and computational toxicology.