Technology for the public interest: preventing capture and promoting welfare

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 a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Chief Executive Officer of the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation. She also serves as Senior Advisor to the President of the African Development Bank on Pharmaceuticals and Health. She holds appointments as a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics (UK) and as an Honorary Professor at the University of Rwanda. Previously, she held several high level positions shaping policy and practical action with governments and the global private sector. These include serving as 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 University'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.

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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.

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