People

Join the lab!

The PI: Charles H. Pence

Prof. Pence is a philosopher and historian of science and technology, working as Chargé de cours and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science and Society (CEFISES) in the Institut supérieur de philosophie (ISP), the Louvain Institute of Biomolecular Science and Technology (LIBST), and the Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He is also executive editor of the journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology and associate editor of the journal Biology & Philosophy. He holds an A.B. in philosophy from Princeton, and a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame.

Current Researchers/Postdocs

Marco Casali

Marco is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy of biology at UCLouvain and an associate member of IHPST (Paris 1 & CNRS). His research concerns molecular stochasticity, biological ontology, abstraction and vagueness in the sciences, and the role of historical contingency in evolution. His project focuses on developing an ontological vision of chance in light of scientific practice. Read more…

Stijn Conix

Stijn Conix is a philosopher of biology. He works as a postdoctoral researcher on the FNRS funded project on conceptual uncertainty in biodiversity and taxonomy. Before that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven. Stijn is currently working on disorder in biological taxonomy, and how this impedes the use of the outcomes of taxonomy. He obtained his Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Cambridge in 2018.

Current Students

Azat Garaev

Azat joined the lab in 2024 as a PhD student on the Epistemodevo project. He is interested in the practices of modeling and idealization in contemporary developmental biology and their relationship with the theories of developmental genetics. He has a background in biology (BSc, Moscow State University) and philosophy of science (MA, University of Bordeaux).

Max Bautista Perpinyà

Max joined the lab in 2021 as a PhD student on the Taxonomic Disorder project. He is studying how the concept of ‘biodiversity’ is operationalised outside the sciences, namely how different communities of actors understand and manage the biodiversity crisis. Max has a background in neuroscience (MSc Université de Strasbourg) and HPS (MSc Utrecht University). He is also one of the cofounders of the Journal of Trial and Error.

Josué Mbeutcha

Josué joined us in 2020, after studying at the University of Dschang in Cameroon. His thesis will examine the concepts of function and teleology in biology, and their impact on questions of normativity and ethics.

Wen Shichao

Wen joined in the lab in 2023 as a PhD student on the typological/population distinction in evolutionary theory. He is particularly interested in how various statistical concepts respond to various foci in evolutionary processes, as well as how statistical concepts were integrated into evolutionary studies in the early 1900s.

Victoria Van Gheem

Victoria joined the lab as a PhD student in 2024. She is working on logic and the philosophy of medicine, co-advised with Pr. Peter Verdée. More specifically, her research focuses on hypotheses for the logical formalisation of normativity in medical reasoning.

Ada

Named for Ada Lovelace, the lab’s mascot can be found searching for swimming time, playing fetch with a tennis ball, or assisting with grading by placing her snoot on top of any available pile of papers. She graduated from Baton Rouge’s Friends of the Animals with a degree in slurps.