People
Lukas Engelmann
Senior Lecturer, Principal Investigator
Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the History and Sociology of Biomedicine at the University of Edinburgh. His research is concerned with the history of epidemiological reasoning in the twentieth century, for which he received this ERC Starting Grant in 2020. His first book, Mapping AIDS, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018 and considers the visual and medical history of AIDS/HIV. He recently published a co-authored monograph with Christos Lynteris, Sulphuric Utopias, with MIT Press (open access) in 2020, which tells the technological history of fumigation and the political history of maritime sanitation at the turn of the twentieth century
I completed my PhD at the University of California, San Diego, in Sociology and Science Studies. I am broadly interested in the ways that scientific expertise is differentiated from other forms of knowledge, and how scientific and technological innovations interact with other forms of social life. I am more particularly interested in the development, introduction, and circulation of new medical and healthcare technologies, particularly those utilizing big data and genomics. My doctoral research concerned the history of genetic epidemiology and its contemporary translations in personalized or precision health research, using case studies of the MyCode initiative at Geisinger Health in Pennsylvania, and the US National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program.
John Nott
Research Fellow, TER
John’s background lies in the medical and economic history of contemporary Africa, with complementary interests in medical anthropology, STS, demography and epidemiology. John was trained at the University of Leeds, where his PhD focussed the history of nutrition and nutritional medicine in West Africa. Until recently, he was engaged as a postdoctoral researcher on Making Clinical Sense (www.makingclinicalsense.com), a historical-ethnographic study of the technologies used medical education, based at Maastricht University.’
Cristina Moreno Lozano
PhD
PhD candidate in the doctoral programme in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Edinburgh. Previously trained in infectious disease science and medical anthropology, Cristina is interested in developing an understanding on how infections, biomedicine, science and societies intersect. Using ethnographic and historical methods, her doctoral research investigates antimicrobial stewardship, one of the main biomedical interventions being implemented to mitigate the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in healthcare settings. Her research has received funding from an Alice Brown scholarship at the School of Social and Political Science of the University of Edinburgh and a Royal Society of Edinburgh Saltire Fellowship.
Karissa Patton
Research Fellow, CBSS & TER
Karissa is a historian of gender, sexuality, health, and activism in the late 20th century. Her current project, ‘Wombs of the Nation,’ comparatively analyses the politics of reproductive healthcare in Canada and the United Kingdom from 1967 to the 1980s. Before joining the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society at the University of Edinburgh, she researched the history of the self-exam as a feminist health practice, collaborating with Whitney Wood, as a postdoctoral fellow at Vancouver Island University. Her doctoral work at the University of Saskatchewan examined the history of local birth control centres in Southern Alberta. Some of this work is featured in her co-edited collection, Bucking Conservatism (open access).
Gladys Kostyrka
Research Fellow, TER (2021 – 2022)
Philosopher and historian of the biological and medical sciences, her research first focused on viruses, controversies about their nature, the definition and origin of life (PhD dissertation, IHPST, Paris 1 University). As a post-doctorate scholar at the School of Social and Political Science (Edinburgh University), she investigates the various forms and challenges of transdisciplinarity in epidemiology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, taking as a starting point the integration of anthropological approaches in the responses to Ebola epidemics from the 1970s until today.
Advisory Board, TER
Susanne Bauer
Professor at the University of Oslo Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, with a focus on health data infrastructures, politics of categories, infrastructures and algorithms in epidemiology and environmental health.
Tamara Giles-Vernick
Senior Researcher at the Institut Pasteur, leading a new research unit in Anthropology & Ecology of Disease Emergence.
Graham Mooney
Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University department for the history of medicine, and historian of public health, infectious disease surveillance, epidemiology and demography.