Dr B. Penders

Bart has built expertise on issues of credibility, integrity and trust in and beyond science for nearly two decades.

He holds an MSc in biology (cum laude) from the Catholic University of Nijmegen (currently: Radboud Univerity of Nijmegen, the Netherlands) in which he specialized in evolutionary microbiology and extremophile microbiology, the former at Nijmegen and the latter at Regensburg University (Germany). Subsequently, he moved into Science and Technology Studies and based upon research conducted in this field, he received his PhD degree in 2008 from Maastricht University (the Netherlands). In his PhD research he dealt with the politics of large scale collaboration.

After two posdoc positions in Maastricht and Nijmegen and visiting scholarships in Bielefeld, Vienna and Christchurch, he now is a faculty member at Maastricht University, School for Public Health and Primary Care, Department of Health, Ethics & Society. He was awarded both the Kootstra and Caphri Talent Fellowships. His research deals with the normative effects of large-scale life sciences. He is mainly interested in how facts, knowledge and norms co-evolve and gain credibility, as well as in the political effects of this co-evolution. He studies these dynamics in the context of nutrition and life sciences. In 2013 and 2014 he was an Edmond J. Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Bart has published five books and over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and chapters and numerous professional publications. His teaching centers on academic development in biomedicine, science and technology studies, global health and food innovation.