Mahmud Farooque is the Associate Director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO), Clinical Associate Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS), and Global Futures Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL) at Arizona State University. Mahmud’s work at the ASU Washington Center focuses on making science more democratic and useful. The useful component engages boundary practitioners at the science and policy interface for reconciling the supply of and demand for scientific information (RSD). The democratic component leverages a distributed institutional network of academics, educators and analysts for participatory technology assessment (pTA). Mahmud is the principal coordinator of Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST) – a distributive institutional network that brings together research centers, informal science education centers, citizen science programs and non-partisan policy think tanks to engage citizens on decision-making related to science and technology policy. ECAST has convened more than 40 public deliberation forums in 18 cities involving over 2100 participants to support policy and decision-making at local, national and global levels on a variety of socio-scientific issues from biodiversity, planetary defense, climate change, and community resilience to geoengineering, automated mobility, Internet and human gene editing.