Dr. Ingrid Metzler
Biography
Ingrid Metzler is a Hertha-Firnberg fellow at the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She studied Political Science at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, the University of Innsbruck (in combination with history), and the University of Vienna, where she defended her doctoral dissertation on the politics of embryo research in Italy in 2013. She was a Marie Curie fellow at the University of York’s Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) in 2005, and a visiting fellow and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2012 and 2013. She has collaborated in numerous research projects on the governance of biomedical technologies at the University of Vienna’s Life-Science Governance research platform. Together with Andrew Webster, she chaired a COST Action on „Bio-objects: matters at the intersection of society, politics and science.“
Research Focus
Ingrid’s research focuses on the biosciences and their entanglement with contemporary democracies. In her dissertation, she studied controversies on in vitro fertilization, human embryonic stem cell research, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in Italy. In her post doctoral research, she has begun to explore controversies on PGD in Germany, comparing them with Italy. More recently she has also begun to explore the mutual stabilization of post-genomics and post-democracy. In doing so, she is also interested in reflections on what these transformations mean for social science research practices. In her current project on „Imaginaries of care“, she follows the emergence of the innovative technology of cffDNA testing in prenatal care in Austria, Germany, and Italy.