Sabina Leonelli

Now

I hold a permanent post as a Research Fellow at the  ESRC Centre for Genomics and Society (Egenis) based at the Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter, UK. I serve as referee for a variety of journals in the philosophy, history and social studies of science, including BJPS, PSA, HSNS, HPLS, Synthese, Studies Part A and C and Science Studies. I also serve as chair of the local organising committee and member of the programme committee of the 2011 meeting of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice, and as a committee member of GARNet, the Genomics Arabidopsis Research Network.
From September to December 2010 I will be on maternity leave, so I might not be accessing my email regularly!

Up to Now

After graduating in the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science in the STS Department of University College London, I completed my MSc in History and Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics. This enabled me to get a PhD studentship at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, contributing to the project Understanding Scientific Understanding. I then spent two years as a Research Officer in the Leverhulme/ESRC project How Well Do `Facts' Travel?, based in the Department of Economic History of the London School of Economics. I have been the Editor-in-chief of the Graduate Journal of Social Science and the Chair of the Dutch Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research Methodology from 2002 to 2007.

Research Areas

My main area of specialisation is philosophy, history and social studies of biology. I am interested in the philosophical analysis of scientific practices, including modelling, abstraction, data sharing, concept-formation, classification, experimentation and ways of understanding and explaining through recourse to embodied knowledge. At the same time, I believe that understanding those practices involves understanding the institutional structures and social orders within which they take place. My current project is therefore focusing on the forms of governance characterising data sharing in model organism research. I look in particular at the standards and classification systems implemented through bioinformatic tools (such as bio-ontologies), and study the impact of these choices on biological research. I am also writing a monograph on the history and current developments of research on Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant that serves as the most popular model organism in contemporary plant science. As part of that work, I am investigating translational issues in plant biology, particularly the use of Arabidopsis as a model organisms for emerging plant biofuels. Finally, I am interested in science & democracy and methodological issues concerning the organisation, usefulness and assessment of interdisciplinary research both in science and in HPSSST.

Teaching

In the academic year 2010/2011, I am co-convenor of the MA core module History and Philosophy of Biology together with Maureen O'Malley and Staffan Mueller-Wille, and I contribute to the teaching of two MSc courses: Research Methods in Sociology (participative observation, object methodologies and interdisciplinary writing) and Genetics in Society (writing skills and the module on scientific governance). I also teach on the Research Skills and Ethics core module for Biosciences undergraduates.

Upcoming Talks

4 February 2010: Invited Lecture 'Bioinformatics in the 21st Century', Universidad Complutense, Madrid
2 March 2010: Workshop on Governance of Data Sharing, Egenis, Exeter
18 March 2010: Public lecture on Biological Modelling at Science Festival, Plymouth
15-16 April 2010: International Workshop on Data-Driven Research in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Egenis, Exeter
6-7 May 2010: Gordon Cain Conference on Personalised Genomics, Philadelphia
31 May - 5 June 2010: Lorenz Workshop on Scientific Understanding, Lorenz Institute, Leiden, The Netherlands
7 July 2010: Panel on e-Social Science, ESRC Research Methods Conference, Oxford
13-14 December 2010: ESF Conference 'Points of Contact Between Philosophy of Biology and Philosophy of Physics', LSE, London
17-18 March 2011: International Workshop on 'Big Science', Exeter, UK
April 2011: Invited lecture at McGill, Montreal
May 2011: Invited lecture Manchester, UK
June 2011: SPSP Conference, Exeter, UK
July 2011: KLI Conference on Theory in Biology