Sara Wylie seeks to develop new modes of studying and intervening in large-scale social issues such endocrine disrupting chemicals and corporate accountability through a fusion of social scientific, scientific and art/design practices.  She continues to investigate those interests through her interdisciplinary classes: Becoming Animal, Technical and Environmental: A practical course in disruptive Art and Design and Art Lab: Artistic investigation of the biological sciences. She completed her Ph.D. at  MIT’s Science, Technology and Society (STS) Program.  Her dissertation, entitled “Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds: an STS analysis of the American Natural Gas Industry”, involved developing web-based tools to help communities and experts across the country study and hold extractive industries accountable for their social and environmental impacts.  This project called ExtrAct was developed in collaboration with artist and technologist Chris Csikszentmihalyi, in MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media. When not teaching at RISD Sara is the Director of Toxics and Health Research for a non-profit she co-founded which is dedicated to developing DIY tools for community based environmental health research.  The non-profit, Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS-publiclaboratory.org), won a Knight Foundations News Challenge Grant in the summer of 2011. The Digital+Media research cluster at RISD, that Sara co-leads with Jeff Warren, works with Public Lab groups and projects nationally and internationally to develop novel ways to visualize, analyze and address environmental health issues.