Sabina Leonelli is Professor in Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter, where she co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis) and leads the "Data Governance, Algorithms and Values" strand of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London, Editor-in-Chief of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and Associate Editor of the Harvard Data Science Review. Her research concerns the methods, infrastructures and assumptions involved in the use of big data for discovery; the epistemology of data-intensive science and its social and scientific implications; the role of the open science movement within global shifts in the production, communication and use of knowledge; and the status and history of organisms (and particularly plants) as scientific models, materials and data sources. Her publications span the fields of philosophy, social science, biology, history, data science and science policy, and include the monograph Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, for which she received the 2018 Lakatos Award. She works closely with the European Commission and a number of national governments and funding bodies on the development and implementation of Open Science policies.
Researcher in environmental science for policy at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, Laura Maxim was trained in systems ecology and has a Ph.D. in ecological economics. Her research focuses on the production, use and communication of scientific knowledge in chemical risk governance - in regulatory scientific advisory activities and in practices of innovation in green chemistry. Over the past 10 years, she has developed methods and tools for knowledge quality assessment and socio-political analysis of uncertainty, in situations of environmental controversy.
Together with Jeroen van der Sluijs, she contributed to the European Environment Agency's report "Late Lessons from early warnings" with a chapter on neonicotinoid insecticides and honeybees. Her scientific advisory activities include participation to working groups at the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
Barbara Prainsack is Professor for Comparative Policy Analysis at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, and at the Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine at King's College London. Her work explores the social, regulatory and ethical dimensions of biomedicine and bioscience. Current research projects focus on personalised and "precision" medicine, on citizen participation in science and medicine, the role of solidarity in medicine and healthcare, as well as regulatory and social aspects of forensic DNA technologies.
Her latest books include:
Barbara Prainsack is a member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies advising the European Commission, and of the Austrian National Bioethics Committee advising the federal government in Vienna. At the University of Vienna she directs the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS).
Jeroen P. van der Sluijs is Professor in Theory of Science & Ethics of the Natural Sciences at the University of Bergen, Norway, and associate professor in new and emerging risks at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His research focuses on scientific controversy on environmental and health risks in situations where scientific assessment is used as a basis for policymaking before conclusive scientific evidence is available on the causal relationships, the magnitude, and the probabilities of these risks.
In the mid 1990s, Jeroen was the first scholar to use Post-Normal Science as the central perspective in a PhD thesis, applying it to the challenge of dealing with uncertainty in risk assessment of anthropogenic climate change. His work seeks to understand and improve the science-policy interface in a context of deep uncertainty by contributing and applying deliberative methods and tools for knowledge quality assessment. He has been working on uncertainty and precautionary risk governance in a wide range of fields including climate change, pollinator decline, endocrine disruptors and risk transformation in sustainable technologies. His work has inspired many scholars and science–policy interface institutions around the world (among them the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the European Environment Agency, and the US Environmental Protection Agency) to develop new ways of interfacing complex science and policymaking. His conceptual work on the phenomenon of uncertainty is widely cited and the various practical tools for knowledge quality assessment he developed are increasingly used in many disciplines and international research projects and on a wide range of sustainability issues.
Jeroen is one of the lead authors of the 2019 SAPEA report Making Sense of Science and was ranked #45 (2018) and #25 (2015) in "The Sustainable 100", the top 100 of most influential Netherlands persons contributing to sustainable development, by daily newspaper Trouw.