Former members
Santiago Gorostiza is an environmental historian working at the intersection of political ecology and the history of science. Since 2019, he has served as the Spanish representative to the European Society of Environmental History.
The Spanish Civil War and postwar have been the key focus of his research, with special attention to anarchist collectivisations of water and land, on the one hand, and the autarkic projects of the Franco dictatorship, on the other. He continues investigating the fortification of the Pyrenean border and guerrilla warfare in postwar Spain.
The production of knowledge about climate and the environment is a more recent research interest. Santiago has studied responses to drought during the 17th century, including the writing of a manuscript on urban water supply for the city of Barcelona, known as Llibre de les Fonts (1650). Other examples include scientific and political debates about river sediment transport since the 19th century or controversies about the relation between potash mining and river salinisation from the 1920s to the present day.
Santiago completed his PhD at the Centro de Estudos Sociais of the Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) as a Marie Curie ITN fellow. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and at the Centre for History at Sciences Po (Paris), where he was part of the Shifting Shores project and remains an affiliated researcher. At the Institut d’Història de la Ciència, Santiago worked on the ERC-funded project “CLIMASAT: Remote-sensing Satellite Data and the Making of Global Climate in Europe, 1980s-2000s” until March 2025..
PhD in Psychology and accredited as expert in forensic psychology. He combines professional practice as a forensic expert with research and university teaching in classes such as "Història de la Psicologia" and "Història de la Psicologia Jurídica i Forense". He has a special interest in the historical development of forensic, legal and criminal psychology and their areas of intervention; in the characterisation of criminals; and in the appearance of measurement and appraisal instruments throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Jorge Molero has been a Full Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He holds a bachelor’s in Medicine and Surgery from the Universidad de Granada, where he also earned his PhD in 1989. His thesis in the field of the history of science earned the extraordinary doctoral award. His academic and research career have been conducted at the Universidad de Granada (1983-1991) and the Universidad de Zaragoza (1991-2000). He is currently the coordinator of the History of Medicine Unit (Philosophy Department) at the UAB’s Faculty of Medicine, where he does most of his teaching.
His avenues of research have focused on analysing the relationship between medicine and the colonisation process in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, the history of social diseases (tuberculosis and malaria) and the study of Spain’s health administration in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is currently analysing the interactions between health and illness processes and subordinated social groups in contemporary Spain, primarily the Spanish libertarian movement.
He works in four branches of research. He has been accredited by ANECA as a member of the corps of university chairs. Over the years, he has been the lead researcher in eight research projects within the National Plan and a researcher and lead researcher in a European Marie Sklodowska-Curie project. In terms of training researchers, he has directed nine doctoral theses, two master’s theses and 15 end of degree master’s projects.
Prof. Dr. Annette Mülberger [Director of the Department for Theory & History of Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences; University of Groningen]
Research interests: Studies on the human mind (19th and 20th century) and history and philosophy of psychology. Current topics: early experimental and applied psychology; criminology and juridical psychology; practices of psychological testing and measurement; crisis debates in psychology and boundaries of science and the history of spiritualism and parapsychology.
Professional service: Director of the Centre for History of Science (UAB) (2016-2019), International Representative of the Forum for the History of Human Sciences (HSS); President of the European Society for Human Sciences (2003-2007; 2016-2018); guest researcher at the Casa Oswaldo Cruz/ Fiocruz (Rio de Janeiro); visiting professor at Uni. Sapienza (Roma) and at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science (Berlin).
Journals: Dynamis (history of science and medicine) (co-editor); Theory & Psychology (co-editor); History of Psychology; Journal for the History of the Behavioural Sciences; Arqueivos Brasileiros de Psicologia; European Yearbook for the History of Psychology; Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia.
Vincenzo Politi is a philosopher of science. His main research areas are: the History and Philosophy of science, with a particular focus on scientific change, scientific progress, and the social, practical, and political dimension of science. He received his PhD in Philosophy of Science in 2015 from the University of Bristol (UK), where he pursued his research with the support of the prestigious Darwin Trust of Edinburgh for Philosophy of Science. He is currently a Beatriu de Pinos Fellow at iHC-UAB (2022-2025).
Before joining iHC, he held postdoctoral research positions at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas at UNAM (Mexico City, 2017-2018); at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (Paris, France, 2018-2019), where he collaborated to the EU Horizon2020 project "Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice" (RRI-Practice); at the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques at the Université Lyon 3 (Lyon, France, 2019), for the nationally funded project PartiSCiP (“Citizen science: new epistemological perspectives on scientific objectivity”); at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Oslo (Oslo, Norway, 2020-2022) where he worked on the RRI aspects of PINpOINT, an interdisciplinary research project on precision oncology.
He has published original research articles in international peer-reviewed philosophy journals such as Synthese, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Theoria, Journal for the General Philosophy of Science, and International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. In 2019, he was the guest editor of “Questions about Science”, a special issue of the journal Theoria.
Graduated in physics and with a PhD in history of science, she is an associate professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has taught courses related to the history of science in the BSc in Medicine, Philosophy, Physics and Science, Technology and Humanities. She currently also works as an adjunct lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), where she teaches STS courses in the MA in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges and MA in Contemporary World History. Her research focuses on the commodification of biological products, such as blood, and how they are inserted into industrial processes, as well as on the history of quantum physics in Spain during the twentieth century.
She conducted an Industrial Doctorate at the iHC in conjunction with Grifols S.A. Her research focused on the rise and industrialisation of haematology and haemotherapy in Barcelona between 1909 and 1950. Through the Grifols Historical Archive, she studied how a modest homeopathic laboratory in Barcelona was transformed into a global pharmaceutical company based on the plasma by-product industry, creating the first private blood bank in Spain. She was particularly interested in examining how first the new technoscientific practices of the early 20th century and later the new industrial patterns of mid-century capitalism changed the scientific manipulation of blood while also transforming its production, use and cultural significance.
Since 2018, she has been member of the communication committee of the Catalan Society for the History of Science and Technology (SCHCT).
After studies in philosophy, history, and political science at the University of Göttingen and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), I obtained my PhD in 2007 from Marburg University in Germany. Before joining ICREA in 2014, I held positions at Marburg (1995-2000); UCSD (2000), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences & Humanities (2001-2005), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2005-2009), and the Dept. of Philosophy, UAB (Ramón y Cajal Scholar, 2009-2014). I am also a member of the CEHIC (UAB), the LOGOS group (UB), the Kant-edition project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and Associate Research Fellow at the Wundt Center for Philosophy & History of Psychology, Universidade Federal Juiz de Fora (Brazil). In 2019, I became elected member of the Academia Europea.
How is reason or rationality understood in philosophy and the human sciences? How should it be understood? What is its function in various domains? These are the guiding questions for my research, which comprises topics reaching from early modern philosophy - esp. Immanuel Kant's philosophy - up to current discussions at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and economics. I study aspects of reason in Kant's philosophy in relation to his notions of truth and the systematicity of science; I analyze the history as well as the potentials and limits of current psychological theories of rationality; and I also study their role in politics, social science, and ethics. I'm moreover interested in the philosophy of knowledge, mind, and science. Methodologically, I combine tools of analytic philosophy and history of science: I am unconvinced by widespread opinions according to which they cannot, or should not, be integrated.
Núria Vallès Peris is a postdoctoral researcher thanks to the Margarita Salas grant at the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center (IDEAI) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and is also a member of the Barcelona Science and Technology Studies Group (STS-b) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Her research focuses on the study of the ethical, political and social controversies surrounding robotics and artificial intelligence, especially in the fields of care, health and public policy. Her approach is based on science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology. She is interested in the study of imaginaries, the design of technologies and the processes of democratisation of technoscience.
Laura Valls Plana was postdoctoral fellow thanks to a Margarita Salas Grant · 3 years for the training of young doctors, which will take place during a two-year research stay at the Centre Alexandre Koyré (MNHN-EHESS-CNRS) in Paris and a third year at the IHC-UAB. She will pursue her research on the urban cultures of natural history at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this case, with a special emphasis on the concept and material culture of "animal skins" and the circulation of knowledge, objects and actors between Paris and Barcelona. The aim is to analyze the change in the public presentation of animals in natural history museums in relation to a broader urban culture of transformation, circulation and consumption of "animal skins" in the European context.
In 2019, she has defended the thesis “Civic nature. Science, territory and city in the park of the Citadel of Barcelona” in which she studied this urban space as a privileged place in the configuration of the conceptions of the nature and of a certain style of divulging of the natural sciences. Special Award Doctorate, academic year 2019/2020.
In the professional field she has had a long career in the field of scientific culture. It should be noted that she has worked for thirteen years in the CSIC Delegation in Catalonia, coordinating various outreach projects with a complex focus, combining interdisciplinarity, digital and face-to-face media, innovative and traditional formats, current issues and reflective content. It is also worth mentioning that she is currently participating in the curation of the new permanent exhibition of the Museu Martorell (the historical headquarters of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, MCNB) on the global/local history of the natural history museums, with Oliver Hochadel (IMF-CSIC) and the MCNB team. [Opening: 2023]