Jacob (Jake) Metcalf assists with teaching and administrating the interdisciplinary graduate student Science & Justice Training Program, in addition to conducting interdisciplinary research on multispecies genomics, animal modeling, and animal biotechnologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also works on issues of temporality, history, and environmental ethics. Metcalf’s PhD is in Philosophy from UCSC, where he studied feminist science and technology studies, applied ethics in the life sciences, and poststructuralist philosophy.

Metcalf’s core research questions concern the construction of ethical inquiry in technosciences: when technoscientific objects are not discretely bounded, how should we address ethical and social justice questions about their creation and use? In assessing these questions through concrete case studies, Metcalf proposes new applied ethics methodologies that account for the boundaries drawn within technoscientific apparatuses, how those boundaries shape who lives and dies, and how science and technology might become more responsive to the conditions and consequences of those boundaries.

His current research examines animality, environment and biotechnology in a variety of guises, including humanized animals, vat grown meat, and multispecies comparative genomics (particularly the Genome 10K Project). Animating this work is the conviction that the hard work of getting along in the world with other beings is done through examining the materialities of specificities of our ways of knowing and doing, and that humans are not the only knowers and doers worth paying attention to.