Robert Meunier

Robert Meunier is a philosopher and historian of the life sciences. His work focuses on the history of genetics and concerns questions of material and conceptual practice in research and the dynamics of scientific change. In 2012 Robert graduated from the PhD program “Foundations of the Life Sciences and their Ethical Consequences,” jointly hosted by the University of Milan and the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM). Since then, he worked at the MPIWG, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Berlin), the Department of History, LMU Munich, the NarrativeScience Project at LSE, and the Department of Philosophy, University of Kassel. As visiting postdoctoral fellow in the MPRG “Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences” at the MPIWG, Robert will scrutinize the notion of “concepts as technologies” with respect to the ways concepts are used by scientists and science studies scholars and regarding conceptual change. Before joining the group, he was the PI in the DFG funded research project “Forms of Practice, Forms of Knowledge – Method, Notation and the Dynamics of Perspectives in the Life Sciences” (August 2018-July 2021) at the University of Kassel. Important results have been published in the article ‘Project knowledge and its resituation in the design of research projects: Seymour Benzer’s behavioral genetics, 1965-1974’ in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.