Hanna Lucia Worliczek

Hanna Lucia Worliczek is a historian of the life sciences and biomedicine, and a microbiologist. From October 2022 to August 2024 she was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Research Group Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences, and from September to October 2024 in Department II, Knowledge Systems and Collective Life at the MPIWG. Her research at the MPIWG focused on the history of validation practices associated with the laboratory diagnosis of human toxoplasmosis since the 1940s. She particularly addressed dynamics at the intersection of and translation between the realms of basic science, laboratory medicine, clinical practice, and public health.

Hanna studied microbiology at the University of Vienna, obtaining her doctorate in 2010 with a dissertation on the immune response to a protozoan infection in pigs. After a four-year postdoc in veterinary parasitology, Hanna pursued her doctoral studies in history of science at the University of Vienna and completed it in 2020 with a thesis on the history of immunofluorescence microscopy as an epistemic tool of cell biologists. Before starting as a postdoctoral scholar at the MPIWG, Hanna was a research associate at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole with Jane Maienschein and afterwards an associate fellow of the Department of History (University of Vienna) with a research scholarship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, investigating the history of descriptive research in cell biology. As a guest researcher at the MPIWG she conducted a study on the history of cell biology within the Max Planck Society. As a visiting scholar, she has conducted her research at the Department for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge; the Chair for the History of Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; the Department of Science Communication and Higher Education Research, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt; and the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna.

In 2019 Hanna received the interdisciplinary Bader Award for the History of the Natural Sciences of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and in 2021 she was awarded the Grete Mostny Dissertation Prize of the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. Drawing from her previous expertise as a microbiologist, Hanna links historiography and historical epistemology with current debates in the life sciences and biomedicine, with an emphasis on visual cultures, molecularization, epistemic practices, validation, and associated values in the twentieth century. Beside her research project on the history of toxoplasmosis diagnostics, her interest in historiographic practices is reflected by her work in the Commoning Biomedicine project at the MPIWG, the preparation of a special issue on research interviews in the history of science and medicine (together with Alfred Freeborn, expected for 2025), and a chapter on “Historicizing Epistemology—Historiographic Practices for the Uninitiated” in S. J. Veigl and A. Currie (Eds.), Philosophy of Science: A User’s Guide, MIT Press (in press). During her time at the MPIWG she was also working on her first monograph with the tentative title “Molecularizing Cell Morphology.”