Nishtha Bharti

Nishtha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the CELS-Oxford group and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Personalised Medicine, St. Anne's College. She researches the interactive dynamics between identity descriptors – such as race, ethnicity, and ancestry – in genomic medicine and their impact on equitability of care.

Nishtha’s research is situated within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and she combines it with her previous training and teaching experience in Political Science. Prior to joining CELS, she has engaged with techno-scientific trajectories in healthcare (particularly digital, data-driven technologies and Artificial Intelligence) and their unfolding across diverse socio-political contexts and transcontinental sites. Through her collaborations she has also looked at the politicisation of specific COVID drugs to understand the peculiarities of crisis governance and to analyse how knowledge claims are legitimised.

In her broader research pursuits, her enquiries span the shifting socio-political logics, contested values and competing epistemic frames in healthcare reforms through emerging technologies.