Hanna Lucia Worliczek

Hanna Lucia Worliczek is a historian of the life sciences and a microbiologist. She studied microbiology at the University of Vienna, obtaining her doctorate in 2010 with a dissertation on the immune response to a protozoan infection in pigs. After a four-year postdoc in veterinary parasitology, Hanna pursued her doctoral studies in history of science at the University of Vienna and completed it in 2020 with a thesis on the history of immunofluorescence microscopy as an epistemic tool of cell biologists. Hanna currently holds a postdoctoral research scholarship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation and investigates the history of descriptive research in cell biology as an associate fellow of the Department of History (University of Vienna) and as a guest researcher at the MPIWG. In October 2022 she will start as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences Research Group at the MPIWG with a project on the history of validation in laboratory diagnostics of human parasitic diseases.

In 2019 Hanna received the interdisciplinary Bader Award for the History of the Natural Sciences of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and in 2021 she was awarded the Grete Mostny Dissertation Prize of the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. Drawing from her previous expertise as a microbiologist, Hanna links historiography with current debates in the life sciences and biomedicine, focusing on visual cultures, molecularization, epistemic practices, and associated values in the twentieth century. Currently she is revising her dissertation as a monograph with the tentative title Molecularizing Microscopic Imaging.