C.F. Sanchez Burmester

Candida Sánchez Burmester is a PhD student at Maastricht University and has experience in moving between geographical and disciplinary cultures. She combines historical and ethnographic methods to analyze a controversy in nanobiology about how nanoparticles enter cells. She observes discussions on this topic at nanobio-conferences and is doing laboratory ethnography with a team of scientists who are replicating influential experiments. Using archival conference material, she contextualizes these discussions historically and traces the origins of nanotoxicology. As part of her PhD, she is also teaching courses in Science and Technology Studies. Candida is supervised by Prof. dr. Cyrus Mody (Maastricht University), Dr. Willem Halffman (Radboud University), and Dr. Alexandra Supper (Maastricht University).

Her PhD is part of the European Research Council-funded Synergy project ‘NanoBubbles: how, when and why does science fail to correct itself?’, a highly interdisciplinary project studying how contested claims in nanobiology emerge, gain popularity, and are being criticized. The goal of the project is to foster scientific debates in which contradictory evidence can be openly discussed and contribute to the correction of the scientific record. In 2024, she has been a Short-Term Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

Candida’s interests lie in Science and Technology Studies, history of science, production of ignorance, epistemic diversity, university-industry relations, and environmental humanities, as well as hiking, traditional Karate, and various Latin American music genres.