Participants

Laura Nuño de la Rosa is a philosopher of biology working on the history and philosophy of developmental biology and evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). Graduated in Humanities, in 2010 she obtained a Master’s Degree in Biophysics at the Autonomous University of Madrid. In 2012 she obtained a Ph.D. on the problem of organismal form in contemporary biology, at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Paris 1-Sorbonne University. After enjoying postdoc positions at the KLI Institute (Klosterneuburg, Austria) and the University of the Basque Country, in 2015 she joined the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Complutense University. Her current interests combine research on the recent history of evolutionary biology with the study of epistemological and ontological issues in contemporary biology, as well as the social implications of biosciences, including synthetic biology, theories of reproduction, and the sciences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beckett Sterner is a philosopher of biology with a background in statistics and computational modeling. His work on evolutionary tempo and mode, biological individuality, and information aims to uncover novel ways of approaching scientific problems and challenges for objectivity given different background assumptions, e.g. about whether models are adequate to represent the phenomena. More broadly, Sterner studies the social epistemology of pluralism: what knowledge do we need to get things done together while differing in fundamental ways? He investigates this question in the context of the life sciences, where globally coordinating data-intensive research has taken on central importance for addressing societal challenges such as biodiversity loss and climate change.