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20Oct

Technology for the public interest: preventing capture and promoting welfare

Hosted by the Department of International Development
In-person and online public event (Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House)
Monday 20 October 2025 6.30pm - 8pm

In this lecture, Padmashree Gehl Sampath compares the trajectories of two critical technology-driven sectors, pharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence, to show how weak policy and regulatory oversight can lead to technology capture and reduce the public interest benefits from technological innovation.

Gehl Sampath will propose ways to arrive at new common – regional and global - approaches to promote technology for the public interest.

Meet our speakers and chair

Padmashree Gehl Sampath is currently Senior Fellow, at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Chief Executive Officer of the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation. She also serves the Senior Advisor to the President of the African Development Bank on Pharmaceuticals and Health. She is also a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics (UK) and Honorary Professor at the University of Rwanda. Prior to this, she served in several high level positions shaping policy and practical action with governments and the global private sector including as a Senior Strategic Advisor to the Africa CDC, and Chair of the Technical Advisory Group for the World Health Organization's COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (CTAP) and as a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein CentRE, among others.

Laura Mann is a sociologist at LSE whose research focuses on the political economy of development, knowledge and technology. Her regional focus is East Africa (Sudan, Kenya and Rwanda) but she has also worked on collaborative research on ICTs and BPO in Asia and has conducted fieldwork in North America as part of a project on digitisation within global agriculture.

Ken Shadlen is Professor of Development Studies in the Department of International Development at LSE. Ken works on the comparative and international political economy of development, with a focus on understanding variation in national policy responses to changing global rules.

More about this event

The Department of International Development (@LSE_ID) promotes interdisciplinary postgraduate teaching and research on processes of social, political and economic development and change.

Join us on campus or register to watch the event online at LSE Live. LSE Live is the home for our live streams, allowing you to tune in and join the global debate at LSE, wherever you are in the world. If you can't attend live, a video will be made available shortly afterwards on LSE's YouTube channel.

This event is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2025, taking place from 18 October to 8 November with events across the UK.

Hashtag for this event: #LSEEvents

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Featured image (used in source code with watermark added): Photo by Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-smiling-woman-in-white-shirt-holding-a-red-flower-8438969/

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