My name is Federico Boem, and I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) where I do research in philosophy of the life sciences and teach.
Previously, I was employed at the University of Twente (NL), in the European project ERC-Syn-2020 ( aka NanoBubbles) which aims to provide new insights on how, when, and why science fails to correct itself.
I have been trained in HPS (history and philosophy of science), epistemology, theoretical philosophy, formal logic and critical thinking, bioethics, and STS (science, technology and, society).
My research interests include philosophy of biology and biomedicine (including technological and methodological aspects), the epistemology of biological knowledge, the relationship between science and democracy, and the philosophy of scientific communication
In the past, I have been working at the Department of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Florence (Italy), on a project concerning the epistemology of scientific communication. The project was dedicated to examining interactions between both clinical and experimental with the wider public, in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I also usually collaborate with the Amedei’s Lab
(https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amedeo_Amedei)
on new conceptual tools addressing the host-microbiota interactions and its implications for personalized medicine and the working definitions of health and disease (also with a focus on the definition of a pathogen from a systemic/ecological perspective).
In this respect, I am also a member of the group PhilInBioMed (https://www.philinbiomed.org/about/) coordinated by professor Thomas Pradeu.
Another line of my research consisted in analyzing aspects of medical reasoning, especially in the context between experts vs non-experts. In this respect, I am also interested in epistemological and social aspects of the problem of vaccine hesitancy.
In the past, I also worked with professor Jan Sprenger's group (http://www.laeuferpaar.de/), where I was developing my research in analysing the struggle over objective scientific claims where the public sphere is involved (such as the case of vaccine hesitancy).
Prior to that, my research was dedicated to analysing the impact of computational biology on contemporary biomedical research. In particular, I have studied the rise of computational classificatory tools, such as bio-ontologies, in the current biomedical context. I’ve analyzed the reasons for this success, including limitations and possible future directions. I have framed my analysis by considering the shift from pure bench research to bioinformatics and I try to set this shift by adopting different epistemic categories as models, paradigms, and styles of reasoning. Thus, I have contended that this new methodology constitutes a theoretical shift. Rather it should be seen as a radical change in the way of doing research and in the way scientific facts become as such.
My work has been possible, and of interest to scientists, because of my involvement in scientific work at the IEO (European Institute of Oncology - https://www.ieo.it/en/) in Milan (Italy) and due to my visiting period to EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/) in Hinxton (UK).
During my training, besides the philosophical work, I did several lab rotations to accustom myself to molecular experimental practice and learn the use of computational resources.
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