Author biographies
Javed Mohammad Alam is a PhD candidate in STS at the Centre Population et Développement (CEPED), Université Paris Cité. He studies the role of digital technologies in the making of contemporary financial inclusion policies in India.
Marine Al Dahdah is a CNRS researcher at the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux (CEMS-EHESS) and a member of Unit 1276 ‘Risks, Violence, Reparation’ of the French National Health and Medical Research Institute (INSERM). She is an associate researcher at the French Institute in Pondicherry and the Center for Human Sciences (CSH) in Delhi (India). Her research focuses on health policies in Asia and Africa, and more particularly on digital healthcare in India, Ghana, and Kenya. She is the author of Mobile (for) Development: When Digital Giants Take Care of Poor Women (Cambridge University Press 2022).
María Belén Albornoz is a professor and researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Ecuador). She is the principal investigator of the Fairwork Project in Ecuador. Her current research concerns technology transfer models; public policy of science, technology, and innovation; big data; ICTs in education; social innovation; and fairwork. In 2017 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Visiting Scholar at Aalborg University in Denmark, where she worked on theorising imaginaries of innovation and policy network analysis.
Henry Chávez is an associate researcher at CEPED (Université Paris Cité), the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) and CTS Lab FLACSO Ecuador. He holds a PhD in social sciences from the École de hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and has an interdisciplinary background in social sciences, economics, politics, and data science. He has worked as a researcher and consultant in the public and private sectors, as well as in social organisations, NGOs, and international agencies. His work focuses on socioeconomic cycles, techno-economic transformations, social studies of science and technology (STS), big data artificial intelligence, and platform economics.
Allison Felix Hughes is a senior lecturer at the Department of Physics, University of Ghana. He was also a Special Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Science of Harvard University, USA. His research interests include air pollution characterisation and modelling, renewable energy technologies, climate change, physics education, and conversion of municipal solid waste (MSW) to energy. He is a member of the Ghana Institute of Physics; Ghana Science Association; Institute of Physics, UK; and the University Teachers Association of Ghana.
Koichi Kameda de Figueiredo Carvalho holds a PhD in sociology (EHESS, Paris) and a BA in law (UERJ, Brazil). He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center Emile Durkheim at the University of Bordeaux and is an associate researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Public Health Emergencies (NIESP/Fiocruz, Brazil) and at CEPED/Université Paris Cité. His work focuses on issues related to biomedicine, global health, intellectual property, and pharmaceutical markets and social justice, and he has worked on local manufacturing and regulation of diagnostics and vaccines in the Global South and public health–oriented R&D models.
Gustavo Matta holds a PhD in public health from the Institute of Social Medicine at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He is currently a senior researcher in Public Health at the Data and Knowledge Integration Centre for Health (CIDACS) at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Bahia (FIOCRUZ). In addition, he serves as coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Public Health Emergencies Unit (NIESP/CEE/FIOCRUZ) and the Zika Social Sciences Network at Fiocruz and is a member of the Fiocruz Graduate Program for Internationalisation. His work particularly addresses public health emergencies and re-emergencies, primary health care, vaccine politics, health policies, and global health perspectives from the Global South.
Ilyass Mahamat Nour Moussa is a PhD candidate in STS at the CEPED, Université Paris Cité. His research focuses on the construction of the Chadian pharmaceutical market in relation to informality.
Cecilia Passanti holds a PhD in science, technology, and society (STS) at Université Paris Cité and is an associate researcher at the Center for Population and Development (CEPED). Her thesis, titled ‘Les infrastructures numériques du vote en Afrique. Biométrie, machines à voter et marchands de démocratie au Kenya et au Sénégal’, is a study of election technologies and biometrics in Africa. Using ethnographic, historical, and sociological methods, she explores new forms of international and industrial governance of public participation and citizenship. She has recently published ‘The (Un)making of Electoral Transparency through Technology: The 2017 Kenyan Presidential Election Controversy’ (Social Studies of Science 2022), and ‘Contesting the Electoral Register during the 2019 Elections in Senegal. Why Allegations of Fraud Did Not End with the Introduction of Biometrics’ (Francia 2021).
Denise Pimenta is a social anthropologist (PhD, University of Sao Paolo) and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Cidacs-Fiocruz/BA), where she is a member of the Public Engagement with Science team. She is also a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Public Health Emergencies (NIESP-Fiocruz). During her PhD, she did fieldwork in Sierra Leone (West Africa) to understand the relationship between the Ebola epidemic and gender issues.
Jessica Pourraz holds a PhD in sociology (2019) from the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She is a postdoctoral research fellow with Sciences Po Bordeaux and an associate researcher at the Center for Human Sciences (CSH) in Delhi. Her research focuses on issues related to science, biomedicine, the environment, and health, and more particularly on the health effects of air pollution in India and Ghana.
Mathieu Quet, sociologist, is a research director at Institut de recherche pour le développement, Paris, and a member of the Centre Population et Développement (CEPED), Université Paris Cité. His research focuses upon the social aspects of pharmaceutical development in India, and he is more generally interested in observing the globalisation of technological markets from Global South countries. He authored Illicit Medicines in the Global South. Public Health Access and Pharmaceutical Regulation (Routledge 2021).
Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar is an associate professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and an associate researcher at the Pôle de recherche pour l’organisation et la diffusion de l’information géographique (Prodig). His work sits at the intersection of economic geography and development studies, examining how emerging economies integrate into global value chains and drive regional development in the Global South. Through extensive fieldwork in India, Yves-Marie’s ethnographic research captures the lived realities of local entrepreneurs, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector, to show how they adapt and innovate to reshape global production networks from below.
Thibaut ServiantFine trained as a pharmacist and historian of medicine. He completed a postdoc at the Centre Population et Développement (CEPED) in Paris, researching the pharmaceutical uses of animal life, and subsequently opened a science café.
Aamod Utpal is a PhD candidate in STS at the Centre Population et Développement (CEPED), Université Paris Cité. His research focuses on analysing contemporary public health topics using STS approaches. He is currently working on the circulation of a humanitarian technology for severe acute malnutrition – ready-to-use therapeutic food – in India.