Research Areas

My research centres on a few core areas, including, but not limited to:

I am also one of the founding members of Nutrition in Transition, a group of nutritionists, clinicians, sociologists and philosophers revisiting nutritional capabilities and credibilities to help nutrition science build relevance and public and peer trust.

General

Over the years I have developed a main interest into issues of collaboration. How do scientists work together to create knowledge? How do scientists cooperate with non-scientists in the process of knowledge production and application? Such questions are becoming more relevant as the teams in which scientists work become larger and more interdisciplinary.

Next to a purely academic interest in how such collaborations emerge, how they are maintained, and how they change over time, my interest is additionally motivated by the fact that collaborative modes have consequences. Whom you work with, under which conditions and for what reasons, influences the outcome of that collaboration. It influences the character of the knowledge produced, it influences where this knowledge will land, whom its audiences are and how it will be used: the politics of collaborative knowledge production.

More recently, I am shifting my attention to another characteristic of new ways of collaborating in science: the construction and distribution of credibility in and beyond science. This more prominently introduces perceptions of integrity and ethical dimensions of partnership choices into the study of collaborative scientific work.

Health, Ethics and Society

I work in the department HES. The issues we examine are current and are ones that require responses that are robust and imaginative, ones that transcend traditional academic barriers. We each come from, and maintain our individual disciplinary identities, but our work is multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary. Our research encompasses many themes, including (next to my own) themes as individuality, rights and responsibilities in healthcare, the challenges of genomics and biobanking, privacy in health, gender and health, the challenges of a global health agenda, innovation in health care, changing demands in Public Health, as well as health and embodiment.  

Key collaborators

I conduct my research in various collaborative projects. Some are explicitly funded as such, others are long-standing collaborations that have held for over a decade.

When it comes to research on the structure, function and governance of scientific collaborations, John Parker, Niki Vermeulen and Ed Hackett are key collaborators. In my study of the evolving relationship between nutrition science and society, these are David Schleifer and Xaq Frohlich. Much of my work on the social study of corporate science is shaped by discussions and interactions with David Schleifer as well.

The role and development of credibility and integrity in the context of scientific team work (including the role of authorship), I currently pursue together with Klasien Horstman, David Shaw, David Townend, and Maurice Zeegers.