People

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Maura Burke is finalizing her PhD on the philosophy of science at Utrecht University. Her work focuses on the nature of human cognition and its role in the nature of scientific knowledge.

Puck is a master's student Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences at Utrecht University.

Sarahanne's a metascientist who conducts research on the science reform/open science movement, debates and controversies in the community, and the practices they engage in. She's not only interested in what goes wrong with science, but in how and why it has gone wrong.

Stefan Gaillard specializes in failure, uncertainty, and erroneous claims – both in science and society. He is one of the co-founders of the Journal of Trial and Error and currently works on the special issue on scientific failure in the health domain.

David is currently a PhD student at Heidelberg University & GESIS bridging the gap between Cognitive Psychology & Measurement Theory.

He is Editor of the Psychology section of the Journal of Trial & Error, striving to embrace the Center's openness concept of publishing & academic exchange for Psychology.

Marcel Hobma is a student in History and Philosophy of Science, and trained as an (investigative) journalist. His interests vary from the Philosophy of Biology to the incentive structure of science. He currently works on his Master's thesis on the cultural evolution of values in nutrition science.

Having a background in theoretical physics, Thomas is finishing his master's in philosophy of science. Passionate about open science and open source software, they manage all the darn IT in this place, and do the typesetting for the journal and publishing efforts of the Center. He also works for the Knowledge Futures Group to make PubPub, the open publishing platform used by the Journal.

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Michelle is currently finishing up her BAs in History and English Language and Culture at the Utrecht University and is interested in political history, memory studies and environmental humanities. Besides her studies, she is the chairwoman of the Dutch Debatbond. For the Center of Trial and Error, Michelle will assist with several projects to advance the Center's goals.

Aoife is completing her PhD in Psychology at Cardiff University where her work focuses on Registered Reports. She works as an associate lecturer at the Open University and at Wrexham Glyndwr University, teaching across psychology and childhood studies. She is particularly interested in transparent and trustworthy health-related research.

Jip is working through their Master's in Industrial and Applied Mathematics, focusing on discrete applications and operations research. They started off as a typesetter for the Journal, channeling their obsessive eye for precision and uniformity. As time goes on, they are expanding their role to include a variety of tasks in the production and IT branches of the Center.

Meike is PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Emory University in Atlanta (USA), with a primary interest in the intersection of cultural imaginaries and histories of science, particularly concerning biopolitics, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities. Meike holds a B.A. and M.A. in American Studies from the University of Groningen, as well as an honors degree in Philosophy.

Merel Smid is a researcher and science communicator with a background in biomedical sciences. She currently performs research at Amsterdam UMC into medical communication, with a particular interest in the communication of medical uncertainty, e.g. when healthcare providers are unsure about the diagnosis or treatment outcomes.

Muriel Strange is a social science researcher who specializes in the interaction between trust, identity, and intuition in healthcare decision-making. I currently work as a project manager at the Journal of Trial and Error and as a freelance researcher in my free time.

Martijn is a historian of science and medicine and works as a lecturer and researcher at Erasmus Medical Centre and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is also a policy advisor on responsible research at Tilburg University. In 2018, he co-founded the Center of Trial and Error and currently chairs the board.

Alex holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Utrecht University and has been involved with the Centre of Trial and Error since its conception. They study European history at Maastricht University, in the Research Master European Studies.

Interested in science communication and education, Violet has been involved with Publishers of Trial & Error since 2023. They are currently finishing their degree in bioprocess engineering at Wageningen University.

Anne Clinio (she/her) holds an MSc and PhD in Information Science from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She is a researcher, member of the Education, Information, and Communication Vice Presidency team of Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Brazil. She is a member of the research groups Open Science and Citizen Innovation Laboratory (CindaLab), ScholCommLab and Intellecti.

Ari Gilboa has been a music therapist since 2001 in various settings and with different clinical populations. He is associate professor and head of the Music Therapy programme at Bar-Ilan University.

Bart Penders is associate professor in Biomedicine & Society at Maastricht University. He studies how scientists establish and maintain credibility for their claims through framing, rhetoric, and social, moral and political alliances. He is interested in collaboration and integrity and studies these dynamics in multiple settings, with a preference for contested epistemic domains, such as nutrition and food sciences and scientific reform. @penders.bsky.social

Bert Bakker is an Associate Professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) and Open Science Coordinator at the University of Amsterdam. He is co-director of the Hot Politics Lab, where he combines political psychology with adjacent fields to study salient socio-political phenomena. His research focuses on topics such as populism, political polarization, and the role of emotions in politics. Bert has a strong interest in open science and actively implements practices such as preregistration, replication, and transparent research workflows in his work. His research has been published in general science journals (Nature Human Behaviour), political science journals (American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics), communication journals (Journal of Communication, Media and Communication), and psychology journals (Political Psychology, Emotion, Journal of Personality). His research is currently supported by grants from the European Commission and the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Candida F. Sánchez Burmester is a PhD student at Maastricht University and member of the ERC-synergy project ‘NanoBubbles: how, when and why does science fail to correct itself?’. She combines historical and ethnographic methods to analyze a controversy in nanobiology about how nanoparticles enter cells. She observes discussions on this topic at nanobio-conferences and is doing laboratory ethnography with a team of scientists who are replicating influential experiments. Using archival conference material, she contextualizes these discussions historically and traces the emergence of nanotoxicology.

https://bsky.app/profile/ccmmody.bsky.social

'Dr Declan Kuch is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture & Society at Western Sydney University and the Net Zero Social Research Lead at NSW Dept of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water. He is a Science and Technology Studies scholar whose research examines how emerging technologies gain legitimacy, trust and public acceptance. His work on automation, energy systems and climate governance connects critical analysis with institutional design, helping build fairer and more accountable futures.'

Gerbrand Koren is an assistant professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, part of Utrecht University. He teaches courses in environmental sciences and his research focuses on carbon cycling in ecosystems and impacts of extreme weather events.

Jakob Kasper is a third-year PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), affiliated with the MSCA doctoral network ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence and Democracy’ and the HotPoliticsLab. His work centers on affective polarization. He investigates how it can be measured in multi-party systems, how research in political science can be bridged with psychological theories of affect to better capture the ‘affective’ nature of polarization, and how affective polarization develops during adolescence. Before joining ASCoR, Jakob received a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and spent one year as a graduate exchange student at Cornell University (USA).

Laurien Hakvoort has been a music therapist since 1994 and has worked as a music therapist in forensic psychiatry for seventeen years, and currently runs a private practice. She is a music therapy lecturer on the bachelor's and (pre-)master's programmes at ArtEZ University of the Arts, and a freelance researcher.

Maarten Derksen is Associate Professor in Theory and History of Psychology at the University of Groningen. He wrote Histories of Human Engineering (Cambridge University Press, 2017), about the dynamic of control in resistance in psychological practices. He is currently working together with Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Stephanie Meirmans, and Jeannette Pols, involved in the research project Replication in Practice, funded by the Dutch Research Council. The team blogs about the project at https://replicationinaction.blog/

Mady Barbeitas is a postdoctoral researcher in NanoBubbles: How, When, and Why Does Science Fail to Correct Itself?, a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) through a Synergy Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme (grant agreement no. 951393). She is also an assistant professor at Sciences Po in Paris, where she teaches courses in Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on scientific movements, biomedical research, and their impact on society.

Maha is a postdoctoral researcher on the NanoBubbles (ERC Synergy project) replication subproject that investigates reproducibility in the nanoscience. She is a trained cellular and molecular biologist with a Ph.D. from Universite Paris Saclay. Aside her bench work Maha works on metascience in general and on research-integrity in particular.

Short biography: Martin Bush is Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. Martin is both a metascientific researcher and a cultural historian of science. He has expertise in popular astronomy in Australia, visual communication of science, the British popularisers Richard and Mary Proctor and the science communication work of the Ngarrindjeri Australian David Unaipon. Martin is part of the MetaMelb lab with metaresearch interests in public trust in science, policy applications of scientific research and the qualitative analysis of expert reasoning.

Melpomeni (Melina) Antonakaki is doctoral candidate at the Department of Science, Technology and Society (Technical University of Munich) and member of the Laboratory for Environment │Human Relations at the Institute of European Ethnology (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin). She researches how practices of investigating research misconduct intercept and intersect with practices of experimental replication in the life sciences, including bioengineering/materials science. She studies controversies that erupt at this intersection, and new types of epistemic activism that exploit dynamics therein, in pursuit of research culture reforms and access at evaluative contexts.

Nicole is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a science and technology studies scholar who studies research cultures in the biomedical sciences, with an emphasis on method and infrastructure reform. She is a former Editor of the journal Social Studies of Science and currently serves as Chair of the Publications Committee for the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

​Peter A.G. van Bergeijk is Professor Emeritus of International Economics and Macroeconomics at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has held prominent roles including chief economist at the Dutch central bank and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. His research encompasses world trade, economic sanctions, diplomacy, and development, with publications in journals such as the Journal of Peace Research and World Development.

Recently, he published his book "On the Inaccuracies of Economic Observation": post: https://blog.trialanderror.org/video_professor_peter_bergeijk_economics

Sergio Sismondo (Queen’s University, Canada) is editor of Social Studies of Science. He is the author of An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, as well as some other general or theoretical works in the field. For a number of years Sismondo’s empirical research has been on how the pharmaceutical industry creates and shapes the knowledge landscapes on which it operates; see his Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma’s Invisible Hands.

Sheena F. Bartscherer is a senior researcher at the Robert K. Merton Center for Science Studies, currently working on mapping global replication networks and the discursive layer surrounding the Open Science movement. She has also worked as a research and teaching assistant at the School for Library & Information Science as well as the School for Social Sciences, department of science studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Additionally, she has worked at the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Center at the Universität Tübingen in a VW Foundation grant-project, researching the drastic (and subliminal) changes in living and working conditions for academics during the Covid pandemic. Her general research interest lies in discourse research, primarily of scientific and political discourses past and present.