The project’s leader group

Rune Nydal

Email: rune.nydal@ntnu.no | website

Associate professor Rune Nydal, Program for applied ethics, Department of Philosophy at NTNU is teaching and researching the philosophy and ethics of science and technology. RN is trained as a physicist and philosopher, with his PhD from Philosophy.

RN has a particular focus on the nature of large scale scientific programs and the institutional integration of ethics in these. His PhD draws on a study of the emergence of the field of functional genomics in Norway. In recent years this interest has been extended into a study of other emerging fields like systems biology and nanotechnology.

Astrid Lægreid

Email: astrid.lagreid@ntnu.no | website

Astrid Lægreid (AL) studied chemistry, mathematics and musicology before doing a master and PhD in biochemistry at the University of Oslo. During her post doctor, AL entered the field of molecular biology which she applied in cancer research. AL played a central role in the establishment of the national functional genomics research programme where she also headed the NTNU platform-node of the national consortium of microarray technology. ALs has pursued epistemic and socio-ethical questions as a central part of her efforts to transform her cancer research strategies from traditional molecular cell biology into a systems biology approach.

Current position: Professor in functional genomics, department of Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, NTNU; past university leadership positions:  Vice Dean, Research, of the Medical faculty, NTNU, 1996-1999; Prorector, Research and Innovation of NTNU, 2005-2009

Martin Kuiper

Email: martin.kuiper@ntnu.no | website

Martin Kuiper was trained in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. A nomadic post-doctoral existence led him though many grants and jobs, allowing him to visit virtually all of the Kingdoms of nature. After a 9-year stay at industry (Keygene n.v., Celera, Aventis) he returned to academia to develop systems biology approaches at the VIB in Flanders, Belgium. In 2008 he started a new Systems Biology group at the Department of Biology at NTNU, Trondheim, to promote the incorporation of systems biology concepts in the life sciences at NTNU. He has always enjoyed working in multidisciplinary settings in the field of technology development and software-aided data extraction and analysis.

• Biology website: https://www.ntnu.edu/biology/systems-biology-group

Key partners of the project

Gaymon Bennett

Gaymon Bennett is Assistant Professor of Religion, Science, and Technology at Arizona State University. He works on the problem of modernity in contemporary religion and biotechnology. His book Technicians of Human Dignity (Fordham, forthcoming 2015) examines the figure of human dignity in 20th century international and religious politics and its current biopolitical reconfigurations. His co-authored book Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (with P. Rabinow, Chicago, 2012) chronicles an anthropological experiment in ethics with engineers reimagining the boundary of biology and computation.

Erik Fisher

Erik Fisher is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Politics and Global Studies and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. He has developed the collaborative, interdisciplinary approach of Midstream Modulation to help understand how social and ethical aspects of science and engineering decision-making may be broadened.  His approach has been employed in over thirty "laboratory engagement studies" on three continents. 

Bjørn Myskja

Bjørn Myskja is

Sandra Orchard

Sandra Orchard is Team Leader for Molecular Interactions at EMBL-EBI. Her team is responsible for maintaining curation standards within the IntAct Molecular Interaction database, and contributes to the annotation of the UniProt knowledge base (UniProtKB); the InterPro resource for protein families, domains and motifs; and the Gene Ontology-Annotation (UniProt-GOA) database. Sandra and her team provide hands-on training in how to make the most of bioinformatics resources.