Alena Kamenshchikova (A.)

Alena works at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Public Health. She focuses on questions around health inequities and health justice by exploring human migration and cross-border movements of goods, services, data, as well as microbes, knowledge and practices. She researches how human-microbe relations are being shaped within diverse socio-cultural infrastructures, and experiments with participatory and art-based methods to study those relations and their consequences for health and illness. Specifically, Alena focuses on cross-border infectious disease control, sexual health, and antimicrobial resistance.

She holds an MA degree in Political Philosophy (cum laude) from the University of Tartu. In 2020 she obtained her PhD from Maastricht University where she explored how antimicrobial resistance is shaped, practiced and governed across microbiology laboratories, public health, and policy documents.

Since 2023, Alena has been embedded within three departments at Maastricht University: the Department of Health, Ethics and Society; the Department of Social Medicine; and the Department of Medical Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Infection Prevention. This cross-departmental positioning has shaped her transdisciplinary approach to research and teaching.

Alena received several awards including the CAPHRI dissertation award, the Niels Stensen Fellowship, the Mingler Scholarship, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences early career partnership award. Since 2025, she has been leading the ZonMw funded project GRAPHIC CARE IDD (Graphic communication for antimicrobial resistance in centers for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities).