Mario Biagioli, an authority in the intersection of law, science and technology, has joined UCLA as a distinguished professor of law and communications.

Biagioli comes to UCLA School of Law and UCLA’s Department of Communication from UC Davis, where he served as a distinguished professor in the law school, history department and Science and Technology Studies program. He also served as the founding director of UC Davis’ Center for Science and Innovation Studies and as an associate faculty member of the Cultural Studies program and the Critical Theory Program.

A leader in exploring how the law interacts with developments in science and technology, Biagioli previously earned a Guggenheim Fellowship for his innovative work, as well as research fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has also received grants from the National Science Foundation and other eminent organizations to pursue his interests, which include patentable subject matter, the history of the idea/expression divide, and the role of eyewitnessing in science.

Biagioli has written or edited eight books in the area, including, most recently, Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research with Alexandra Lippman (MIT Press, 2020) and From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times with Vincent Antonin Lépinay (Duke University Press, 2019). Currently, he is finishing a book on the new forms of scientific fraud and misconduct that arise through the introduction of metrics of academic evaluation.

Biagioli previously served as a professor of the history of science at Harvard. He has also taught at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, UCLA’s Department of History and the European University at St. Petersburg.

Biagioli holds an M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop and the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History of Science from UC Berkeley.