At the College, the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program doesn’t simply ask students to study science — it asks them to question what science is for, who it serves, and how it shapes the world we inhabit. It is a discipline that thrives in the in-between: part history, part philosophy, part cultural critique, and part ethical inquiry. For Thom Klepach, who has taught in both the Chemistry and Biology departments at the College before making STS his academic home, the program represents a way of thinking that reshapes how students understand science, society, and their place in the world.
Klepach speaks of the undergraduate experience being a “magical time,” the “golden hour” in students’ intellectual development — the moment when conceptual habits loosen and a broader orientation takes hold. “I want students to have an experience in my classroom and have them reflect back on it and feel that it made me think about the world in a different way, as a watershed experience.”
STS courses are designed to create such moments. They mix empirical modules with reflective exercises: experiments alongside readings, data projects with historical case studies, technical skills paired with moral reasoning. To Klepach, “being at Colby comes with a necessary responsibility that [faculty] have to be able to put young minds out there.” The goal is not simply to build competence, but to shape perspective — to graduate students who can situate scientific problems within their social context and make decisions with that awareness in mind. “To be able to be a part of and have an effect on who an individual becomes and how they conceive of the world and themselves and their place in the world — it’s a massive privilege,” Klepach says.
That emphasis on context is also corrective. As STS major Kate Olenik `27 notes, “science has been constructed in a way that hasn’t been fair to all groups of people.” STS draws attention to such inequities, exposing how disciplinary boundaries and institutional hierarchies have long excluded certain perspectives and obscured harms.
Klepach frames the work this way: “science [is] asking questions that get at the fundamental assumptions that are your blind spot, which is where inconsistencies happen, where conundrums and paradoxes happen.”
As Olenik adds, “Knowledge production does not encompass all opinions… it makes me wonder if it’s reliable, accurate, and what voices are missing.”
From an ethical standpoint, Klepach explains a discontinuity between modern science and modern ethics: “All of the practices that are inherent in the sciences did not anticipate the ethics of today. How can we make choices that don’t make that mistake? Where are ethics leading us, where are they hoping us to go?” With technology distorting our culture in one way or another, he adds, we get to a point where the cultural framework we have does not meet with the ethic of what we want. “How do we make decisions now with our science and technology that are serving that future?”
For Klepach, whose passions span across fields, STS became a natural home that melds his interests. He sees the program less as a fixed path than as a framework that holds everything together: “It’s trying to be a glue, a superstructure; a way of thinking about questions that can be applied to any discipline.” In other words, STS doesn’t confine, it connects.
Olenik echoes this vision, stressing the freedom it gives students to carve their own routes. “With STS, you can take any path that you want and I love how broad it is. Even though I don’t know what I want to do, STS gives me the opportunity to choose which direction I could take.” Where Klepach sees STS as the glue, Olenik experiences it as a compass: both descriptions pointing to the same reality of a program designed to bridge disciplines while opening futures.
STS, at its core, is not just about critiquing science or tracing the histories of technology. It is about reimagining what knowledge is for, and who it should serve. As Klepach put it: “We are born on this earth to share and to lift each other up. And to somehow transcend our self and find a connection with other people around the privilege of being able to explore and study and expand our minds and move humanity towards a better place.”
“STS has an enormous amount of potential and power,” Klepach expresses. “We truly believe that all of us need the STS way of thinking and viewing the world.”
Olenik reinforces this notion: “Being an STS scholar, we have a job to share our viewpoints because it’s a useful, more humanistic way of approaching technology and society that we need to bring into the world.”
~ Josefina Moehn-Aguayo `26
[…] Klepach views STS as a framework that holds together diverse viewpoints, fields, and ideas. “It’s trying to be a glue, a superstructure; a way of thinking about questions that can be applied to any discipline,” he said in a recent Colby Echo article. […]