Dr. Zoe Nyssa

Biography

Zoe Nyssa is an Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. As an applied anthropologist, she specializes in expert decision-making and technical cultures. Her research integrates traditional ethnographic qualitative methods with computational social science, focusing on areas such as text mining and topic modeling to explore the relationships among knowledge practices, governance, and questions of risk and justice. Nyssa's work has received funding from numerous organizations, and she has held positions as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and as a Ziff Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. At Harvard, she worked at the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. At Purdue, she has co-developed a new Master’s track in Applied Practicing Anthropology and advises graduate students in M.S. and Ph.D. programs, focusing on projects related to expert technical cultures, environmental science, and climate policy using mixed-methods approaches. Nyssa holds an Honours Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Toronto, Canada, an M.A. from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Research Interests

Courses