About

Nikolas Rose was Professor of Sociology at Kings College London from 2012 until his retirement in April 2021. He was the founding Head of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s and Co-Founder and Co-Director of King’s ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, the UK’s first major research centre on the social dimensions of mental distress. The author of 10 books, including the recent The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Hannah Landecker holds a joint appointment in the Life and Social Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles as a Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Society and Genetics. She is a historian and sociologist of the life sciences and biotechnology after 1850, with research interests in biological problems contoured by industrialization and modern life. The anthropogenic “biology of history” that she studies includes antimicrobial resistance, metabolic and epigenetic disorder, and enzyme engineering. She has been a Senior Editor at BioSocieties since 2019.

Catherine Waldby is a Research Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS), Australian National University. From 2015 to 2022 she was the Director of RSSS. Her researches focuses on social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. She is the author of over sixty research articles and seven monographs. Her recent books include Clinical Labor: Tissue donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (with Melinda Cooper, Duke University Press 2014) and The Oöcyte Economy: The Changing Meanings of Human Eggs Duke University Press (2019). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the History and Philosophy committee of the Academy of Science. She has received numerous national and international research grants for her work on stem cells, embryology, blood donation and biobanking, from the Australia Research Council, the National Health and Research Council, the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the European Union FP7 program. Her work has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Korean and German.

Dr Filippa Lentzos is Reader (Associate Professor) in Science & International Security at King’s College London, where she is jointly appointed in the Department of War Studies and the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. A biologist and social scientist by training, Dr Lentzos’s research critically examines biological threats, health security, biorisk management and biological arms control, and she has written widely on these issues. Dr Lentzos serves as the Director of the King’s MA in Science & International Security. She is also an Associate Senior Researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a Non-Resident Scholar at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), and she serves as the NGO Coordinator for the Biological Weapons Convention.

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada.

Anne Pollock is a professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, where she serves as head of department. Her research explores feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial engagements with science, technology, and medicine. She is the author of three books: Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference; Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery; and Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States.

Chloe Silverman, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Politics. She works in three related areas, which inform her choice of research topics and the courses she teaches. Most centrally, she studies the role of affect in scientific knowledge, how public claims about affect are used to establish authority, and the role of affect as an analytic tool and method in science studies. The second area, the productive entanglements between so-called “lay” and “expert” knowledge, emerges from her work on affect, because the social movements that have engaged medical authorities and patient groups have almost always had an affective dimension. Third, she looks at the modes through which information about scientific practice—as opposed to scientific findings—is communicated to different publics. Discourse about what science is or ought to be shapes both peopleʼs reception of scientific information and their personal investment in science as a form of knowledge.

Ayo Wahlberg is Professor MSO at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Working broadly within the field of social studies of (bio)medicine, his research has focused on traditional herbal medicine (in Vietnam and the United Kingdom), reproductive and genetic technologies (in China and Denmark) as well as health metrics (in clinical trials and global health). In his current project “The Vitality of Disease – Quality of Life in the Making”, funded by the European Research Council (2015-2021), a team of ethnographers are exploring how chronic living forms the everyday lives of millions of people who live with (chronic) conditions throughout the world and has emerged as a therapeutic site. He is the author of Good Quality – the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (University of California Press), co-editor of Selective Reproduction in the 21^st Century (Palgrave MacMillan) co-editor of Southern Medicine for Southern People – Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and editor at the interdisciplinary journal BioSocieties (Palgrave Macmillan).