Alessandro is a science policy researcher and professional interested in understanding and shaping the interface between science, politics, and society in Europe. He is currently doctoral candidate in STS at University College London (UCL), and recently completed a Fulbright-Schuman fellowship in the STS Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School. His research focuses on expert advice in EU policymaking. Coming from a background in philosophy of science, Alessandro has professional experience in UK, EU, and international science policy, having worked at UNESCO, the Royal Society of London, the UK Royal Society of Biology, and the European Commission. He serves as Secretary of the Association of Italian Scientists in the UK (AISUK) and co-founded the #ScienzaInParlamento science policy campaign in Italy.

Federico Brandmayr is a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, where he is part of Expertise Under Pressure, a project funded by the New Institute Foundation that focuses on the dilemmas and challenges experts face in contemporary societies. He has a background in sociology and philosophy of science and holds degrees from the University of Trieste and Sorbonne University. His research focuses on the cultural authority of science, on legal and political threats to scientific research, and on the involvement of scientists in court cases, both as experts and defendants. He has written extensively on the L’Aquila trial, in which several researchers were prosecuted following a deadly earthquake in central Italy. His work has appeared in Science, Technology, and Human Values, in Social Epistemology, in Science as Culture, and in the European Journal of Social Theory, among others. In the summer of 2021, he will join the MacMillan Center at Yale University as a postdoctoral associate.

Emanuela Gambini is a Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Commercial Studies, Queen Mary University of London and am completing an MSc in Comparative Politics at LSE, London. She has a background in law, being a lawyer specializing in IP, having earned a JD in Law from the Catholic University S.C. in Milan and an LL.M. in Intellectual Property from the WIPO and the School of Law of the University of Turin. She earned her PhD in Commercial Law at CCLS, Queen Mary University of London. Her PhD thesis, entitled “Imagined Nature: Narratives and Metaphors in the Co-production of Biotech Patentable Inventions” addressed how the use of metaphors and narratives has proved pivotal in expanding the scope and settling the meaning of patent eligible matter in several jurisdictions by drawing on STS theoretical frameworks. In 2006,Emanuela was a Fellow in the Science, Technology & Society Program directed by professor Sheila Jasanoff at the Harvard Kennedy School and her approach to the problems at the crossroad of technoscience, law and IP is co-productionist.

Luca Marelli is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow (2018-2020) with the Life Sciences & Society Lab, researching on the politics of biomedical innovation of the European Union. Luca lectures on bioethics and Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Milan, and he is member of the Science & Democracy Network (SDN) and the Belgian Science, Technology and Society network (BSTS).

Mariachiara Tallacchini is professor of Philosophy of Law at the Faculty of Economics and Law, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Piacenza, Italy) and of Science, Law, and Democracy at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste – Italy).

She earned a degree in Law and a PhD in Legal Philosophy (University of Padua), and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the STS programme at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University), where she also attended the Centre for the Biology of Transplant at MGH-Harvard Medical School, working on the regulatory aspects of xenotransplantation. She has been a consultant to the Italian Parliament and the Italian Commission of Bioethics, and collaborated with the WHO Regional Office of Rome on Environment and Health. Between 2007 and 2009 she has chaired the European Advisory Group on Science in Society for FP7. From 2013 to 2015 she worked as Senior Scientists at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC, Ispra). Her interests concern the legal regulation of science and technology and the relationships between science and democracy, especially in the domain of the life sciences and their interfaces with ICT.