Dr. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee Reflects on Her STIAS Individual Fellowship

I was first drawn to the caliber of scholarship and the remarkable community that STIAS brings together. My 2026 cohort included scholars from an impressive range of disciplines, career stages, and countries, creating an environment that encouraged conversations and collaborations rarely possible within traditional academic settings.

I first became acquainted with STIAS in 2022 when I participated in an interdisciplinary workshop examining the "African Genome." That experience revealed how intentionally the institute fosters dialogue across genetics, the humanities, social sciences, and bioethics. When the opportunity arose to apply for an Individual Fellowship, it felt like the ideal setting to return to a book project that had been on the back burner for many years.

The fellowship also provided something increasingly rare in academic life: uninterrupted time to read, think, and write alongside others engaged in similarly ambitious projects. More than three decades after the launch of the Human Genome Project, it was the perfect moment to revisit how genomic science has reshaped ideas about race and human difference, while reflecting on the role bioethics has played in shaping both the science itself and its translation into society.

I planned to engage what I considered the most conceptually demanding material in the book that focuses on two ideas in particular. The first is what I call institutional morality: the question of whether, and how, the institutions that fund, govern, and produce genomic science can be said to bear moral responsibility for ensuring benefit is derived from genomic research. The second idea is the moral economy of values in genomic science as in the way social and cultural values circulate, are prioritized, and are exchanged, often as ethical practice. Being in daily dialogue with fellows at STIAS who are anthropologists, sociologists, and religious studies scholars and historians really added to my thinking, and forced me to sharpen my arguments.

Interacting with a broad range of scientists and scholars also required to find shared language. Daily lunch conversations with fellows studying as disparate topics such as the social behavior of the Cape honey bee to the politics of dress in Malawian popular, you are forced to hone your translation skills and render your ideas legible to the interested non-expert, stripping away jargon and taken for granted concepts. I found this exercise valuable as it influenced how I speak about my project but also how I write. This is especially important for my book project that is intended for a broad public audience and that I hope will reach well beyond bioethics and academia, to speak to anyone trying to make sense of how scientific claims about human difference get made and what is at stake in them.

Finally, and importantly, writing about racialization in science and the construction of population categories used in genomics while living in South Africa was valuable. To write about how place, history, and sociopolitical context shape our understandings of human difference in a country where those questions have indelibly shaped contemporary life helped me think critically about American centric perspectives on the story of genomics. 

What makes the environment so generative is that everyone around you isthinking rigorously about history, about culture, about method,  and iswilling to press on your ideas without dismissing them. Several conversations sent me back to my chapters to reconsider how I wasframing an argument, or whether an explanation actually held up outside my own field's habits of thought. I did not always change my mind, but I always came away with a sharper sense of what I was claiming and why.

Some of the most important shifts in my thinking came not from a single exchange but from being made to think comparatively. I came to STIAS with a book largely framed by the American story: genomics read through the long shadow of race in the United States. Working in South Africa, in daily conversation with scholars for whom apartheid's system of classification ispalpable still, forced me to ask what is specific to the American case and what is not. Two societies organized around formal racial categories and their histories, and how those histories can shape distinct genomic imaginaries. I was grateful for this writing context.

Being a STIAS fellow has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career, professionally and personally. Part of that was the place, and part was the care evident in the programming — every detail seemed designed to make deep thinking and writing possible. But what I will carry with me most is the people. My cohort embodied the very best of what scholars and scientists can be: generous with their time and attention, endlessly curious, open-minded, and, perhaps rarest of all, intellectually humble. To anyone considering an Individual Fellowship, I would say to come ready to be changed by the company you keep. The protected time is a gift, but it is the community that makes this experience so special. I arrived hoping to make significant headway on a difficult book, and I left invigorated by a better version of the book and with colleagues who I hope will continue to be interlocutors moving forward.

As much as I loved the environs of the institute and my office, much of what I will remember from South Africa happened outside through informal book readings, dinner gatherings and walks with colleagues. We also were able to experience the rich cultural offerings of nearby Cape Town. I’ll just mention two organized experiences  that moved me . The first was a group outing, arranged by one of the STIAS fellows, to Spring Is Rebellious: The Art & Life of Albie Sachs at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. Curated by Dr. Phokeng Setai, the exhibition traces the life of Sachs, an activist, writer, and lawyer who defended those charged under apartheid laws before going into exile in 1966, and who, after the country'sfirst democratic elections, was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court and became one of the architects of the post-apartheid Constitution. The installation offered a powerful arc of the nation’s history and the hard struggle for justice.

The second was Rise '76: The Story of June 16, a play commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Soweto student uprising, written and directed by Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni. Drawing on interviews and documentary evidence, she tells the story through the lives of a handful of students caught up in the protest against Afrikaans being imposed as the medium of instruction in their schools. The storytelling was extraordinary, and it put the complicated, painful history of this country into stark relief. What has stayed with me about both experiences, and about so many others I came to treasure, is the way they held two things at once: the historically specific, hard-won lived experience of this place, and the common humanity that binds all of us.