Gili Vidan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of the History of Science and research fellow at the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard.
Her work explores digital technologies, changing notions of public trust and democratic governance, and narratives of crisis and future-making in the US. Vidan's dissertation, titled "Technologies of Trust: The Pursuit of Decentralized Authentication and Algorithmic Governance," traces technical attempts to solve the problems of trust and transparency, with a focus on the development of electronic payment systems and public key cryptography in late 20th- and early 21st-century US. She is a 2018-19 graduate fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics and a doctoral associate of the Science, Religion, and Culture Program at the Harvard Divinity School. Vidan holds a MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford and an AB in Social Studies from Harvard.