Dr Paola Castano Rodriguez

I am a sociologist of knowledge and science, and my work focuses on space science. My research also engages with political sociology, epistemology of the social sciences, philosophy of science, and valuation studies. I am a research fellow in the Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments project where I lead a subproject about open science practices in space biology in NASA's Open Science Data Repository.

In 2021 I completed a Newton International Fellowship at Cardiff University in which I finished a sociological study of scientific research on the International Space Station (ISS), one of the world’s most diverse and complex research platforms. My project combined a detailed examination of NASA experiments (in plant biology, biomedicine, and particle astrophysics) with assessments of value about the station (in Congressional program reviews, scientific advisory panels, and media reports). The book resulting from this research is Beyond the Lab: The Social Lives of Experiments on the International Space Station and it is in process of completion.

I have a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, and undergraduate degrees in History and Political Science from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá. My ISS project, which marked a departure from the topics I researched during my doctorate, was funded and supported with postdoctoral positions at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, the Free University of Berlin, Waseda University in Tokyo, and the British Academy.