Stephanie Hood

Stephanie is Deputy Head of Communications at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She is responsible for managing the public communications team, strategy development, and coordinating special projects including the Journalist-in-Residence program. In 2023 her team received a Max Planck Society Diversity Excellence Fund award for the project “Intersectionality in Public Communications Strategy," which will support the MPIWG in developing a long-term communications strategy that utilizes an intersectionality framework in its process, implementation, and delivery.

Stephanie has a BSc (Hons) in Biology from the University of York UK (2009), and an MSc (with Distinction) in History of Science jointly awarded by University College London (UCL) with Imperial College London (2013). Her research interests include the history of visual culture in science and society, and contemporary public communications at the intersection of the social sciences, humanities, and STEM.

She recently published her first book chapter, "Science, Photography, and Objectivity? Exploring Nineteenth-Century Visual Cultures through the HMS Challenger Expedition (1872–1876)," available open access in the edited volume Scientific Visual Representations in History (eds Valleriani, Giannini and Giannetto: Springer 2023). Her current project continues to explore the interconnections of the expedition’s visual and scientific practices with colonialism, political propaganda, economic commodification, public communication, and to theories of scientific racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Before joining the MPIWG, Stephanie worked as an editor at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.