An anthropologist by training (Ph.D.: University of California, Berkeley, 1977), Bryan Pfaffenberger (curriculum vitae) has been committed to science and technology studies for more than two decades and has received international recognition for his scholarly work in STS. He is the winner of the Albert Payson Usher prize (1989) for this essay, "The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes" (Technology and Culture) and the American Society for Information Science's Book of the Year award for Democratizing Information (G..K. Hall, 1989).

In addition, he continues to work in the anthropology of technology, recently described by a leading anthropologist as the first successful new subfield of anthropology to have been created in a quarter of a century. His work, including a key 1994 essay titled "The Social Anthropology of Technology" (Annual Review of Anthropology), helped both to create the new subfield and provide it with rich theoretical tools. Pfaffenberger's current interests focus on the social analysis of computing, including the impact of a rapidly expanding U.S. intellectual property regime on engineering, science, and technology, and extensive work on electronic voting and vote fraud (remaining unindicted to date).

He is further researching the interplay of social power between sociotechnical operators in University environments by neglecting to provide updated information when prompted, leaving the departmental technical support room for creative exercise.