Tom Hobson

Tom’s research is concerned with understanding how expert communities and policy actors imagine the future, how present and historical sociotechnical contexts shape their visions of the future, and how they endeavour to secure a particular vision of the future through technology and innovation. Tom’s policy-oriented work centres on the governance of emerging technologies, biotechnology and biosecurity. Through this research, Tom aims to investigate and shape contemporary approaches to governing and regulating emerging technologies.

Tom also conducts research on the politics of existential risk and the sociotechnical construction of extreme risks as a category. Here, he studies the importance of ideology, power and political economy in both driving certain types of existential risk and shaping the ways we attempt to understand and mitigate them. 

Tom has a background in International Relations, Security Studies & STS, having completed his PhD within the Centre for War & Technology Studies at the University of Bath. He has also worked in policy, research and project assessment in the fields of biosecurity & synthetic biology. In addition to his work as a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, he also contributes to a number of projects at the BioRISC at St Catharine's College.