Anna Bruins
Anna Bruins is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). Her research focuses on scientific travel occurring under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company’s network, and how travelers contributed to colonial bioprospecting activity around the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Her fascination lies with the conceptualization of nature and the nonhuman in travel writing, and what this reveals about early modern ideas of ownership, value, and progress. She is committed to help expand the Shells and Pebbles network beyond the Netherlands and support authors in bringing their stories to life.
Bianca Angelien Aban Claveria
Bianca Angelien Aban Claveria is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History, Leiden University. Her research broadly covers the history of preventive medicine in the Philippines, from the American Colonial Period to the Japanese Occupation Years (1898-1945), with particular interest on relevant medical research and experiments involving tuberculosis and leprosy. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she was an Instructor at the Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University, and an Editorial Assistant of the Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints journal. When she’s not busy learning about complex acid-fast bacilli or controversial vaccines, she shifts her attention to other interests like disaster studies and the history of typhoon warning systems.
Marieke Gelderblom
Marieke Gelderblom is working on a PhD in the history of statistical graphics at the Freudenthal Institute at Utrecht University. She is investigating why graphics were so widely embraced and how they became so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century Dutch society. Prior to her PhD, Marieke studied History and Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University, with a specialisation in Science Communication at Leiden University. Her background is in Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. By combining these fields, she hopes to find out why numbers and mathematical structures are so helpful for understanding our world. She enjoys thinking, talking and teaching about the history of science and sees Shells and Pebbles as a platform to collect and share these fascinating stories.
Elian Schure
Elian Schure is a PhD candidate specializing in the history and philosophy of the life sciences at Utrecht University. She works on the conceptualization of race/ ethnicity in microbiome research in South Africa. Her main focus in this project is on the role that race plays in biological research, and how scientists can communicate about race/ethnicity in a productive way that does not rely on stereotypes. As an editor of Shells and Pebbles, she hopes to be able to contribute to the publication of many interesting topics in the history of the life sciences.
David Skogerboe
David Skogerboe is a PhD Candidate at Utrecht University who specializes in the history of the twentieth-century ‘Space Age’ in its cultural and social contexts. As a researcher within the Freudenthal Institute, David focuses on the intersection of space history and science communication as it relates to imagining the future, and the impact such imaginings have on the development, implementation, and utilization of sociotechnical space technologies. He is eager to help ensure Shells and Pebbles serves as a mechanism for growing and uniting the history of science and humanities community.
Lisa Vanderheyden
As a PhD Candidate, Lisa Vanderheyden partakes in provenance research about an anatomical and cultural historical collection of foetuses originating from the museum Vrolik in Amsterdam. There is little known about the origin of the collected foetuses (Where did they come from? Who were their parents? And did their parents consent to having their children be preserved of not?). Her research aims to answer these questions and to look more broadly at the ways miscarriage, abortion and stillbirth was perceived in Dutch society and medical market of that time. Lisa is excited to be on the editing staff of Shells and Pebbles, and to make the history of medicine an integral part of the history of science community.