Dr Philippe van Basshuysen has recently assumed the position of professor of public health ethics at the Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences (CELLS) at Leibniz University Hannover. The professorship deals with central philosophical and ethical issues raised by public health, which are of great scientific and societal relevance, especially given recent and ongoing crises such as epidemics, global warming, demographic changes, and various political and distributive conflicts. His research seeks to answer urgent issues arising in public health, the development and use of novel technologies, and the design and regulation of markets, by integrating perspectives from philosophy, politics and economics (PPE). Similarly, his teaching at CELLS will centre around public health and PPE.
He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics (LSE), following a B.A. in philosophy at Heidelberg University and an M.Sc. in philosophy of science at the LSE. Before adopting this position at CELLS, van Basshuysen was an assistant professor at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and a postdoc at Leibniz University Hannover.
Van Basshuysen is PI of the ERC Starting Grant 'Managing Performative Science' (MAPS). Within this project, he and a team of PhD students and postdocs will do research on scientific models that do not only represent but influence the course of events, for better or worse, and the project will provide strategies for evaluating and managing these effects. His appointment represents a valuable addition to the research focus on 'Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science' at Leibniz University Hannover and strengthens research and teaching in the areas of ethics, the philosophy of science, as well as PPE.
