SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES
Karen Baker is Co-Director of the local Ocean Informatics Initiative, research affiliate with UCSD
Science Studies Program, and Information Manager with the Long-Term Ecological Research
Program and with the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, University of California San Diego. Her long-term interests are in data stewardship,
information infrastructure, and learning environments as they unfold through engagement with
everyday scientific data practices, information systems design and community collaboration.
Interests in data organization and information management are informed by earlier work in solid
state physics, bio-optical oceanography and environmental data analysis.
Pascale Bourret is Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) at Université d’Aix-Marseille where
she teaches sociology. She is also a researcher at the INSERM-IRD- Université d’Aix-Marseille UMR
SE4S unit (Economic and Social Sciences, Health Systems and Societies). She has published articles
on bio-clinical collectives in the domain of BRCA testing. Her present work centers on the
transformation of biomedical practices in connection to the development of genomic tools, with a
focus on clinical work, the production of clinical judgment and clinical decision-making.
Alberto Cambrosio is Professor in the Departments of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill
University. His work centers on biomedical practices and innovation, in particular at the clinical–
laboratory interface, with a focus on the application of genomic technologies to the diagnosis and
the therapy of cancer and the development of cancer clinical trials as a new style of practice. His
publications include Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Latetwentieth-century Medicine (MIT Press, 2003) and Exquisite Specificity: The Monoclonal Antibody
Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1995), both co-authored with Peter Keating. A new book (also
coauthored with Peter Keating) entitled Cancer On Trial: The Rise of Oncology as a New Style of
Practice will be published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2012.
Peter Keating is Professor of History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His area of expertise
combines the history of medicine, and the sociology of science and technology. His publications
include Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Late-twentieth-century
Medicine (MIT Press, 2003) and Exquisite Specificity: The Monoclonal Antibody Revolution (Oxford
University Press, 1995), both co-authored with Alberto Cambrosio. A new book (also co-authored
with Alberto Cambrosio) entitled Cancer On Trial: The Rise of Oncology as a New Style of Practice
will be published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2012.
Jessie Kennedy has been with Edinburgh Napier University since 1986, where she has held the post
of professor since 2000 and is currently Director of the Institute for Informatics and Digital
Innovation. Her research interests are in information visualisation and database systems. Her early
work on data modelling and interfaces to databases led to an EPSRC grant in 1996 to investigate
Systematic Generic Support for User Interfaces to Databases . This was followed by an EPSRC/BBSRC
bioinformatics grant to investigate: A Novel Database System for Classifying Biodiversity in
conjunction with the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh(RBGE). Work on information visualisation (IV)
in parallel with this resulted in research in and a tool for Visualising Multiple Overlapping
Classification Hierarchies. A follow-on grant: Capturing and Relating Character Concept Definitions in
Plant Taxonomy with RBGE was awarded in 2001-2004. Work on taxonomic data models and
databases continued with support from the National Science Foundation, USA where Prof. Kennedy
was a principal investigator on a large cyber-infrastructure project - SEEK (Scientific Environment for
Ecological Knowledge) in collaboration with 8 USA institutions. This work led to her grant on the
project “TaxVis: Visualisation Tools for Integrating Large Alternative Linnaean Taxonomies”, funded
by EPSRC in 2006-2008 and in working with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility which
adopted her data standard in their global cyber infrastructure and use of the visualisation tools for
understanding of multiple classifications. Her work in biological data visualisation continues with a
BBSRC grant VIPER, to visualise and clean errors in pedigree genotype data in collaboration with the
Roslin Institute. Prof Kennedy has also worked in other visualisation areas and was co-investigator
on an EU funded project OPaL, investigating techniques for measuring and capturing trust in on-line
communities forming partnerships and allowing users to visually explore the information when
creating partnerships. She is active in exploitation of her research outcomes and in 2007-2009, she
led a Proof of Concept project “MATSE: Information Visualisation of Microarray Time-course Data”,
to deliver high quality interactive visualisation software for the analysis of microarray time-course
data. She has published widely with over 90 peer reviewed publications, has had over £1 million in
research funding, 11 PhD students complete, has been programme chair, committee member and
organiser of many international conferences and acts as reviewer for many national computer
science funding bodies.
Nina Kohli-Laven is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine
at McGill University and at the Institute for Health Policy Studies, at the University of California, San
Francisco. Her research explores the production of emergent health technologies, combining
anthropology, history, and science and technology studies. She has published on risk and narrative,
looking at genetic diagnoses of orphan diseases. Her present work investigates the politics of breast
cancer screening in the purview of new genomic technologies, looking at how regulatory and
bioclinical infrastructures connect to styles of reasoning about risk and therapy.
Sabina Leonelli is a Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis) based at
the Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter, UK. Her research spans the fields
of history and philosophy of biology, science and technology studies and general philosophy of
science, to investigate the epistemic and regulatory role of experimental practices such as data
sharing, abstraction, modelling and concept formation. She is currently exploring the use of escience tools, such as bio-ontologies and databases, for ‘data-driven’ and ‘translational’ research
on model organisms. A special issue she is editing on ‘Data-driven research in the biological and
biomedical sciences’ will appear in 2012 in Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological
and Biomedical Sciences.
Wendy Parker is Assistant Professor of philosophy at Ohio University. She received her Ph.D. in
History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003. Her research addresses
epistemological and methodological questions about computer simulation modeling, especially
weather and climate modeling. She is particularly interested in how complex computer simulation
models can be evaluated, how they can provide evidence for hypotheses about real-world target
systems, and how they are used in “assimilating” traditional observational data. She is also
interested in the roles of science in public policy; upon finishing graduate school, she spent a year as
a Congressional Science Fellow in the U.S. Senate.
Paul Schofield has been in the Dept. of Physiology Development and Neuroscience at the University
of Cambridge since 1990. He has recently been concerned with the development of mouse and
human disease ontologies and informatics approaches to discovery of mouse models of human
disease. Amongst other research activities he was Coordinator of the European Commission FP6
Bioinformatics Co-ordination action CASIMIR, and partner in the EC funded European radiobiological
archive, ERA-PRO. He is now engaged in developing a new radiobiology data warehouse, STORE with
the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection, and is a partner in the EC EUMODIC
mouse phenotyping project. As part of CASIMIR he was involved in coordinating international
standardisation of mammalian phenotype data and interoperability of phenotype databases in
Europe, North America and Australasia. Part of this project involved looking at the wider aspects of
data sharing including the development of international infrastructure, intellectual property
considerations and the problems of funding large-scale transnational projects in the
biological sciences. He sits on the informatics steering committees of the International Knockout
Mouse project and the International Mouse Phenotyping projects and is adjunct Professor at the
Jackson Laboratory, Maine, USA.
Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Wylie is a philosopher of
science who works on philosophical issues raised by archaeological practice and by feminist research
in the social sciences, for example, ideals of objectivity, the role of contextual values in research
practice, and models evidential reasoning. Her publications include Thinking from Things: Essays in
the Philosophy of Archaeology (2002); edited volumes and special issues such as Feminist Legacies /
Feminist Futures (co-edited with Gruen, Hypatia 2010), Value-free Science? (2007, with Kincaid and
Dupré), Epistemic Diversity and Dissent (Special Issue of Episteme, 2006), and Feminist Science
Studies (Hypatia, 2004); and essays that appear in Travelling Facts (2010), The Ethics of Cultural
Appropriation (2009), Agnatology (2008).