Note on Open Access: my publications are freely accessible from Data Studies and Open Science Studies, the ORE site of the University of Exeter, PhilSci Archive and (when not outrageously expensive) in Gold Open Access format thanks to the generous support of ERC, ESRC, EPSRC, ARC and the University of Exeter. Orcid ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7815-6609.
I am Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter since 2017, having spent much of my career at this University (I first arrived in 2008). In summer 2024, I will be the Kluge Chair in Technology in Society at the Library of Congress, Washington DC. From September 2024, I will hold the Chair of Philosophy and History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Munich, where I will co-direct a new "Public Science Lab" and the Ethical Data Initiative while maintaining a honorary affiliation with the University of Exeter.
I serve as President-Elect of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB); Council member for the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DLMPST) of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology; Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review; and Subject Editor for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. I also serve in the Scientific Advisory Board for the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research and hold a Honorary Professorship at the School of History of the University of Adelaide and a Research Associature with the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dorhn in Naples. I have been elected Fellow of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie de la Science, the Academia Europaea, and the Royal Society of Biology, and member of AcademiaNet. From 2019 to 2023 I was a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London and Editor-in-Chief of the international journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. From 2013 to 2024 I directed the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis); and from 2019 to 2024 I was theme lead for the "Data Governance, Openness and Ethics" strand of the Exeter Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDSAI).
My research spans the fields of history and philosophy of biology, science and technology studies and general philosophy of science, and currently focuses on four interrelated strands: [1] the philosophy, history and social studies of data-intensive science and empirical inquiry, especially the impact of Big and Open Data and related AI on research and wider society, responsible data management and governance, data infrastructures and the construction of semantics to enable data linkage in the plant/agricultural sciences and biomedicine; [2] the philosophy and history of Open Science, and the scientific and social implications of implementing related policies and procedures; [3] the philosophy and history of organisms as research models, with a focus on experimental organisms; and [4] the history and epistemology of thet plant and agricultural sciences, especially the global circulation of plant data, its relation to biological materials and agricultural development strategies, and its significance for understanding 21st century biological research beyond the lab.
Current funded projects:
- 2021-2026: PI of European Research Council Consolidator Grant "A Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments" (PHIL_OS) Research Fellows: Paola Castaño, Richard Williams (starting 11/2024), Rena Goldstein (starting 2025). See the URL for details on the project and whole team.
- 2024: Kluge Chair in Technology and Society, John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, Washington DC. Project: "Openness, Democracy and the Evolution of Technologies of Evidence"
- 2019-2024: Co-I on EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre on Environmental Intelligence, led by Hywel Williams
From September 2021 to June 2022, I was based in Berlin as a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, working on "Excellence and Diversity in Global Scientific Practice". I was recently the PI of the Turing Project "From Field Data to Global Indicators: Towards a Framework for Intelligent Plant Data Linkage" (2019-2022) and the European Research Council Starting Grant "The Epistemology of Data-Intensive Science" [DATA_SCIENCE] (2014-2019). I was also a Co-I on the ARC Discovery Grant Organisms and Us: How Living Things Help Us to Understand Our World, led by Rachel Ankeny (2016-2020); the ESRC Research Grant Social Sensing of Health and Wellbeing Impact from Pollen and Pollution, led by Hywel Williams (2017-2018); the Leverhulme Trust Grant Beyond the Digital Divide, led by Brian Rappert (2015-2017); the ESRC Research Grant Understanding the Use of Digital Forensics in Policing in England and Wales, led by Dana Wilson-Kovacs (2018-2021); and the British Pharmacological Society project The Future Landscape of in vivo Skills, led by Gail Davies (2016-2017).
Books: The textbook Data and Society: A Critical Introduction (with Anne Beaulieu) was published by SAGE in 2021. The edited volumes Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage (with Hugh Williamson, 2022) and Data Journeys in the Sciences (with Niccolo Tempini, 2020) and my Elements Philosophy of Open Science (2023) and Model Organisms (with Rachel Ankeny, 2020) are now downloadable in Open Access format from Springer and Cambridge University Press. The monograph Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, published in 2016 by Chicago University Press, won the Lakatos Award in 2018 and the Patrick Suppes Prize for Philosophy of Science in 2022 (Korean and Chinese translations are forthcoming). Links to all reviews are here. I am currently working on a monograph on empiricism in the 21st century, which is a much-expanded English version of my 2018 book La Ricerca Scientifica nell'Era dei Big Data ("Scientific Research in the Era of Big Data", published in Italian by Meltemi, in French by Mimesis [2019] and in Portuguese by Editora FIOCRUZ [2022]).
Advisory / policy roles: I am interested in the governance and use of large data infrastructures and in the implementation of Open Science, and I am in regular dialogue with national governments, international bodies and scientific societies/institutions on this issue. I am a Plan S Ambassador (2019-2024) and acted as a Thinker in Residence for the 2021-2022 programme on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science by the Flemish Science Academy. I am an evaluator for the Italian National Centre for High-performing Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing, and I serve as advisor for the FAIR-IMPACT project, the SAIL database, and the Royal Society Working Group on the Implications of Disruptive Technologies for Research, among other initiatives. The University of Exeter presented a highly rated impact case study for REF2021 around my research and policy engagement on Open Science. In 2016-2019 I was a member of the Open Science Policy Platform of the European Commission (co-authoring, among other statements, the 2018 OSPP-REC) and in 2017-2018 I served as a key expert in the Mutual Learning Exercise on Open Science (Policy Support Facility) of the DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission. I am an alumna of the Global Young Academy, where from 2015 to 2017 I led the Open Science working group within the Research Environment thematic area. In March 2018 we launched a groundbreaking report on "Global Access to Open Software: The Forgotten Pillar of Open Science", based on a survey carried out by GYA members in Ghana, Nigeria and Bangladesh. I authored many other policy reports, available here.
Service to the history and philosohy of science: I am President-Elect of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), due to serve as President in 2025-2027 and Past-President in 2027-2029. I am an executive board member of the PhilSci-Archive (the Open Access archive for the philosophy of science) and the executive committees of the UK Network for the Integrated History and Philosophy of Science, and the European Advanced School for the Philosophy of Biology (whose 2018 edition I organised with Thomas Reydon). I am part of the editorial board of the journals Philosophy of Science, Big Data & Society, Social Epistemology, Patterns and Data. I have been Vice President (2019-2023), senior co-Chair of the EPSA Women's Caucus (2015-2019) and member of the steering committee (2013-2017) for the European Philosophy of Science Association; and I served in the executive committee of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice (whose 2011 meeting I hosted in Exeter) from 2011 to 2022. I also served as chair of the nomination committee of the Philosophy of Science Association (2019-2021). I have chaired the Grene and Callebaut Prize Committee of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) in 2019-2021 and helped to coordinate the UK network for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Plant Science in the early 2010s.
Service to the natural sciences: I strongly value collaboration with colleagues in the natural sciences and I am on the advisory board of the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage Database (SAIL), PomBase and the European Arabidopsis Stock Centre, among other scientific projects and institutions. Between 2009 and 2020 I served as an ex officio member of the steering committee of GARNet, for which I produced a report on data dissemination practices in plant science and organised the conference "From Big Data to Discovery", resulting in the publication of a paper on data management practices in Nature Plants in 2017.
Talks and Visiting Positions: I have been invited to present my work to a variety of audiences across several countries and institutions, including numerous leading universities, the Royal Society, the European Commission, the European Research Council, the Leopoldina, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Science Forum, the Indian Statistical Institute, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the International Data Curation Conference, the Philosophy of Science Association Public Forum and the Field Museum. I have held visiting positions at the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Evolution and Cognition (2005), the University of Minnesota (Centre for the Philosophy of Science, 2012), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (project "Sciences of the Archive", 2014; Colloquium visitor, 2019), the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science in Gent, Belgium (2018), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2021-22) and the Library of Congress (2024).
Biography: I moved from Italy to London in 1997, to undertake a BSc course in History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science at the STS Department of University College London. Thanks to my great teachers, those three years had a crucial influence on my intellectual development. I then earned an MSc in History and Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics and I worked as a research assistant to Hasok Chang in the 'Measurement' project at the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. I carried out my doctoral research in the Netherlands as part of the project ‘Understanding Scientific Understanding’ based at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with Henk de Regt and Hans Radder. Between 2002 to 2007, I founded and served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Graduate Journal of Social Science and I followed the training provided by the WTMC (Netherlands Graduate School for Science, Technology and Modern Culture) and the Flemish-Dutch Graduate Network for the philosophy of science. Before landing in Exeter in 2008, I worked as a research officer in the Leverhulme/ESRC project ‘How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?’ based at the Department of Economic History of the London School of Economics and led by Mary Morgan. I have been funded by several public and private bodies, including the European Research Council (Starting and Consolidator awards), the ESRC, the British Academy, the Alan Turing Institute, the EPSRC and the Leverhulme Trust, to carry out a variety of projects in the history, philosophy and social studies of science - especially biology, biomedicine and data science.
In the past, I have coordinated the postgraduate teaching in SPA and have served as diversity and inclusivity officer for the department. At the undergraduate level, I have offered an 'experimental' course to third-year philosophy students, in which they got to do original research and produce professional papers (the best outputs are published on the digital platform Pragmatism Tomorrow). I continue to teach classes at MA level, including a module on Data Ethics and Governance as well as a long-running module on Cultures of the Life Sciences.
I am a member of the Philosophy of Science Association, the European Philosophy of Science Association, the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Biology and the Society for the Philosophy of Information. I frequently serve as a referee for several journals in the philosophy, history and social studies of science, as well as funding bodies from the UK, EU, USA, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, France, Germany and Belgium. I aim to referee at least two papers every month, though I frequently referee more.
