Participants

Participant Group
Headshot of Matteo Mossio

Matteo Mossio

Cluster:
Agency and Directionality in Development, Evolutionary Origins and Transitions of Agency, Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
An organizational account of ecological functions, Intrinsic purposiveness and the shaping of development, Integration and individuation in the origin of agency, Open-ended evolution and organizational closure

Matteo Mossio is Chargé de recherche (tenured) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), full member of the IHPST (https://ihpst.pantheonsorbonne.fr/), Paris, France. Matteo Mossio works mainly in philosophical and theoretical issues related to biological autonomy. He published several articles in international philosophical and scientific journals as well as chapters in collective volumes. In 2015, he published (together with Alvaro Moreno) a full monograph on the theory of autonomy (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789401798365). Matteo Mossio obtained funding for and took part in numerous research projects in France and abroad. He attended or organised over 90 national and international seminars, workshops, symposia and summer schools, and served as a reviewer for many international philosophical and scientific journals. He supervised several PhD and Master students. He regularly teaches in the Philosophy Program of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne.

Nei Nunes-Neto

Nei Nunes-Neto

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
An organizational account of ecological functions

I am Associate Professor of Epistemology of Science and Science Education at the School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Federal University of Grande Dourados (UFGD), Brazil. I am affiliated to the Graduate Studies Program in History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching (Federal University of Bahia and State University of Feira de Santana). My research interests are in science education research, philosophy of biology and ethics. Also, I'm a researcher of the National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE), funded by the Brazilian agencies CNPq and CAPES, and gathering 200 researchers from different fields.

Davide Pisani

Davide Pisani

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
Chance versus purpose in biosphere evolution

Davide Pisani is Professor of Phylogenomics at the University of Bristol. He obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of Parma (Italy), and his PhD at the University of Bristol. After that, he worked at Pennsylvania State University, the Natural History Museum in London and the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He has been a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and his research focus on major evolutionary transitions, using the origin of the eukaryotic cells, of animals and processes of colonisation of land as models.

Claudio Reis

Claudio Reis

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
An organizational account of ecological functions

Claudio Ricardo Martins dos Reis is Associate Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology at the Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Member of the History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching Lab (LEFHBio) and the National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE). He works in the areas of philosophy of science, especially of biology, and the areas of ecology and science education research.

Emiliano Sfara

Emiliano Sfara

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
An organizational account of ecological functions

I’m an Italian postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, since 2018. My main research interests focus on the influences of Kant’s ideas of organism in Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of medicine and biology. The theoretical interconnections between philosophy of science, philosophy of action and philosophy of artistic creation in Canguilhem’s thought oriented my previous doctoral and postdoctoral investigations in France (IHPST of Paris, Université Montpellier 3), Italy (Università della Calabria) and Canada (CIRST, Université du Québec à Montréal). The application, from an organizational perspective, of the concepts of normal and pathological to ecosystems will be one of the most relevant research topics for me in the years to come.

Graham Shields

Graham Shields

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
Chance versus purpose in biosphere evolution

Graham Shields is Professor of Chemical Geology at University College London. He received his PhD from the ETH Zurich in 1997 on the chemical and isotopic evolution of the oceans during the Ediacaran through Cambrian bioradiations when animals first diversified into shelled and muscular forms. Since that time he has worked in France, Canada, Australia, Germany and China as well as the UK on diverse aspects of Earth history and sedimentary geochemistry. Currently, his research group at UCL explores how life and its physical environment have co-evolved through geological time. Graham is the scientific coordinator of a joint UKRI-NSFC programme on Biosphere Evolution, Transitions and Resilience (BETR) and chair of the Earth System Science group of the Geological Society of London.

Danielle  Way

Danielle Way

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
Geofunctions: purposes and agents in global environmental sciences
Institution:
Western University

Danielle Way is an Associate Professor in Biology at Western and the Director of the Biotron Experimental Climate Change Research Centre. Way specializes in understanding plant responses to rising atmospheric CO2 and warming, combining biochemistry, physiology and modeling. She is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, and received the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists’ C.D. Nelson Award for outstanding early career research in plant science. Way holds appointments with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Lab and Duke University, and is the Reviews Editor for Global Change Biology and the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Plant, Cell & Environment, top journals in her field. She has 81 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals such as PNAS, Nature Ecology & Evolution and Global Change Biology, resulting in >6075 citations and an h-index of 35.

Tom Williams

Tom Williams

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
Chance versus purpose in biosphere evolution

Tom is an Associate Professor in Molecular Evolution at the University of Bristol, UK. His research focuses on the phylogenetics and comparative genomics of early life, particularly the deep relationships among Archaea and Bacteria and the origins of eukaryotic cells.