Doctoral studies
The PhD in History of Science seeks to train expert researchers in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. From its privileged interdisciplinary status, research in the history of science is an essential link to overcome the barriers that separate the humanistic and scientific cultures. For this reason, the programme welcomes a diverse selection of students who are united by their interest in the study of the relations between science and society.
The discipline’s analysis tools, with history as their pillar, enable us to provide an informed view of the relevant role science has in today’s society.
*Coordinator of the PhD studies in History of Science at the UAB
*Annual PhD reviews 2024-2025: June 25 & 26 2025.
*Progress report deadline: June 13 2025, following the 3rd. part of this document: PhD report.
Annual PhD reviews 2023-2024: June 25th & 26th 2024.
Annual PhD review 2022-2023 [June 28th & 29th]
PhD STUDENTS (2022-2023)
I am a student of the PhD programme at the Institute for the History of Science (iHC-UAB) and a member of the CLIMASAT project “Remote-sensing satellite data and the making of global climate in Europe 1980-2000" led by Dr. Gemma Cirac-Claveras.
With my research I seek to investigate the set of materialities, knowledge, practices and actors involved in the production, analysis, circulation and use of Earth monitoring satellite data during the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, my research project starts from the fact that, although Earth observation satellites have the capacity to monitor the entire planet, the infrastructures and resources needed to do so are not accessible around the globe. Recognising this asymmetry, I propose to investigate a project from the end of the XXth century led by the Cartographic Institute of Catalonia where they used data from the French SPOT satellite to monitor territories in South America, with the aim of contributing to the understanding of how satellite data and its users contribute to the construction of global and environmental knowledge about the Earth. Some of the questions I intend to address are to identify the different actors involved in or affected by the project, the power dynamics and relations they perpetuated or shaped, and how different ways of obtaining, processing, communicating and circulating satellite data informed different knowledges, actions and experiences. Also, how these practices were - and are - intertwined with technical, scientific, environmental, economic, social and political conceptions and implications.
Before starting my PhD, I did a Master's degree in History of Science and a Bachelor's degree in Physics, both at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. My interests include the history of technology in interrelation with environmental history, the history of ecological thought, experiences and resistances in the construction of science and technology as well as the relationship between science and gender.
Samuele Andreoni is a political and environmental anthropologist, currently PhD student at UAB-IHC. He started his career at the University of Pisa studying contemporary history, focusing on suburbs and pedagogical methods during infancy and adolescence.
He pursued his studies in anthropology at the University of Torino, where he started focusing on political and environmental issues about the contemporary world. He graduated with a thesis titled “Myths of marble. Extractivism, Culture and Labour in the Apuan Alps”, that focused on the socio-ecological consequences of exploitative extractivism of white marble and the mythologies and narrations that reinforce it on the territory.
During the following years he worked on the relation between private property and ecological and cultural damage, working both in Bolivia and Italy. He’s now focused on the role of commons in generating ecological and cultural based practices that try to balance the relation between society and nature.
I am a first year doctoral student at the Institute for the History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. My research focuses on hoaxes and fraud in the nineteenth-century United States. I am especially interested in the dynamic relationships between scientific “experts'' and the public. My research considers many types of deception and seeks to understand the negotiation of authority and truth-findingthat accompany them.
My previous academic experience includes a bachelor's degree from Portland State University in Humanities and a master’s degree from the Universitat de Barcelona in Applied Linguistics. I am drawing from my linguistics background in my current research
to carry out quantitative corpus analyses of hoaxes published in nineteenth-century newspapers.
I completed a postgraduate certificate in Museology from the University of Washington in 2021. During this course I explored themes that are now central to my PhD research, including science popularization, co-creation of knowledge, and science as entertainment. I had the opportunity to complete a research practicum for an exhibit in the Museu Martorell with Dr. Laura Valls and Dr. Oliver Hochadel, who is now my PhD thesis advisor.
My research interests include science and its publics, heterodox science and medical practices, charlatanism and spectacle, visual and material cultures of science, nineteenth-century American sociology, and many adjacent fields.
I’m a PhD student at the Institute of History of Science (IHC, UAB) and I’m conducting my research at the Institution Milà i Fontanals, Spanish National Research Council (IMF-CSIC) since September 2021, supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. My thesis focuses on the analysis of the participation of the Red Cross in the field of blood donation and transfusion. It’s part of the R&D project entitled Transnational humanitarian medical action and technological innovation in confinement spaces (1870-1950) (TRANSHUMED).
I have a degree in Humanities (Pompeu Fabra University) and Human Nutrition and Dietetics (Ramon Llull-Blanquerna University) and a Master in Nutrition (UOC). I have participated as a researcher in research projects on the history of diabetes, history of nutrition, war medicine and humanitarian action during the Spanish Civil War. Prior to academic research I participated in the production of film initiatives, in Spain and abroad, as well as in the organization of several scientific congresses. I have additional postgraduate degrees in Film (UPF, La Fémis and Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg), Cultural Management (University of Warwick) and Teaching (VIU).
My research interests focus on medical humanitarianism, advances in war medicine (particularly in the development of transfusion therapy), the process of institutionalization of nutrition science in Spain and the history of community nutrition.
She is an PhD student at the Institute for the History of Science (IHC, UAB) and an MA in the History of Science: Science, History and Society (UAB). Her research focuses on maternity in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century and her thesis advisor is Mònica Balltrondre Pla (Associate Professor in the Faculty of Psychology at the UAB).
Research interests: History of Medicine with a gender perspective, The social construction of motherhood in the medical and psi knowledge at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
I am a historian and a magister in history from the National University of Colombia. Fellow of the FI-AGAUR program of the Generalitat of Catalonia, and beneficiary of the recognitions granted by the Medellín SAPIENCIA Higher Education Agency, extending national borders-postgraduate courses and international postgraduate courses. I am currently a student of the PHD program at the Institute of History of Science (IHC, UAB), with a thesis directed by Professor Jorge Molero on medicalization and normalization of childhood in Colombia from the application of Mental Hygiene between 1920 and 1960. Since undergraduate I have been interested in the topics of health history, and since 2015 I have been working continuously in the line of research: history of medicalization, normalization and social control of childhood and history of child psychiatry in Colombia. I’ve participated in several research projects, including: "The sanitation of schools in Colombia 1886-1930". "Medicalization of childhood and social control: preliminary exploration in Medellín and the Near East". "The medicalization of childhood and insanity examined through the institutional care and mental hygiene in Colombia in the twentieth century." "Poverty and madness as" social diseases "in Colombian modernity, 1850-1950", developed at the National University of Colombia.
My lines of research are the history of childhood, the history of mental hygiene, the history of child psychiatry and the relationships between eugenics, childcare and mental hygiene.
I am a student in the doctoral programme at the Institut d’Història de la Ciència (IHC, UAB) with a scholarship from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Inovación.
My thesis “Between science and politics: the role of experts in the origins of international negotiations on climate change (1979-1992)” is directed by professor Agustí Nieto Galán.
In my research, I study how climate became a scientific, politic and diplomatic issue in the late 1970s, when the first international conferences about climate change took place. After comparing the different scientific assessment models coexisting in that decade, I put in context the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the main advisory institution for the next decades. I also try to explain why this model became the dominant one and the reasons behind this.
Another fundamental question of my thesis is how climate experts frame scientific knowledge of climate change to be understood by politicians, and how this frame dictates the type of questions and solutions that may be discussed later in international negotiations.
My research also explores the complexity of the figure of the expert, working at the same time as a scientist, but also holding positions of power and playing a role in activism and diplomacy. I follow the figure of Jill Jägger, a climatologist who participated in different conferences and working groups on climate change and who became the leader of the Stockholm Environmental Institute in 1987. Through her career, I also would like to give to my research a gender perspective.
Before starting my PhD, I did a master’s degree in History and Philosophy of Science at the Université de Paris (Paris VII, Diderot) and a bachelor’s degree in Physics and Mathematics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
My interests include the history of climatology, the history of ecological thinking, the relations between scientist, experts and politics, science and diplomacy, environmental history and science and gender
Soc estudiant del programa de doctorat de l'Institut d'Història de la Ciència (iHC-UAB) amb una beca del European Research Council dins el projecte “CLIMASAT. Remote-sensing satellite data and the making of global climate in Europe. 1980-2000”, sota la direcció de la Dra. Gemma Cirac.
La meva investigació gira entorn les negociacions sobre la producció, intercanvi i preservació de dades generades per satèl·lits d'observació de la Terra en el període 1980-2000. L'objectiu és establir un relat sobre com aquestes dades van ser apropiades per part de diferents organitzacions internacionals en els debats sobre el clima, i definir quines dades exactament es van utilitzar. La recerca se centra en els actors, activitats i reivindicacions vinculades a centres de dades, bases de dades, organitzacions internacionals, conferències, xarxes, agències reguladores, acords d'intercanvi de dades, infraestructures, o programes de recerca a través dels quals la producció, circulació i ús de dades satèl·lit es mobilitzaren a escala internacional i quina concepció del clima en resultà. A més, la recerca vol també entendre quins actors van quedar exclosos d’aquestes negociacions i per quins motius, i quins actors van capitalitzar la capacitat de negociació. Això permetrà explicar quin ha estat el relat construït sobre el Canvi Climàtic, i el valor epistèmic que les comunitats científiques i polítiques atribueixen a les dades de satèl·lit.
Prèviament a començar el meu doctorat, vaig cursar un Grau en Ciències Ambientals (UB) i un Grau en Filosofia (UB). Posteriorment, vaig cursar un Màster en Enginyeria Ambiental (UPC) i un Màster en Història de la Ciència (UAB).
Els meus interessos inclouen història dels satèl·lits d'observació de la Terra, ciència i diplomàcia, història de dades, història de la tecnologia i història ambiental.
I’m a doctoral student at the Institute for the History of Science (IHC, UAB), a center where I develop my academic training as a FPU 2020 Predoctoral Researcher. The doctoral research that I develop around the thesis “Origin and destination of life in the Universe: a social history of astrobiology in Spain” focuses on a historical study of this curious and young scientific discipline in the spanish context, necessarily taking into account the international and European context. With the purpose of elaborating a social history of astrobiology in Spain (1942-2007), I’m interested in demarcating the exobiological antecedents in the spanish social and scientific context and studying and establishing what external factors to astrobiology have been crucial for its constitution. Likewise, I also pay special attention to the social and cultural implications of astrobiological research and exploration, as well as the exploration of the philosophical aspects involved in the constitution and development of astrobiology as a science, mainly related to its interdisciplinary nature and the transdisciplinary approach that it involves.I have a degree in Philosophy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in the 2015-2019 class, with a Mention in Fundamental Philosophy and with an Extraordinary End of Studies Award. From 2019 to 2020 I studied the Master's Degree in Teacher Training with a specialty in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, a training that up to now has allowed me to work as a professor of Philosophy in several catalan public institutes. Currently, thanks to having obtained a FPU predoctoral contract, my entire professional life is dedicated to my doctoral research.My interests are centered in the Philosophy of Science and the History of Science, as well as in the intersections that arise between both disciplines in questions that have to do with modes of knowledge, with the role of social and cultural factors in the constitution of science and with the role of science in shaping social and cultural reality. That is to say, at the same time that I study the historical questions around a scientific discipline, I’m interested in investigating the philosophical questions necessarily raised, both by the scientific discipline and by the philosophical assumptions that underlie the historiographic approach adopted.