Massimiliano Simons is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Technology at Maastricht University and a voluntary staff member at the Institute of Philosophy (HIW) at the KU Leuven. After a MA in Philosophy (KU Leuven, 2014) and a MSc in Sociology (KU Leuven, 2015) he started a PhD in philosophy (funded by FWO) at the Institute of Philosophy at the KU Leuven in 2015, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Cortois. He defended his PhD in 2019, entitled "The Raven and the Trojan Horse: Constructing Nature in Synthetic Biology". It focused on the recent emerging discipline of synthetic biology, which aims to understand life by synthesising it in …
Massimiliano Simons is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Technology at Maastricht University and a voluntary staff member at the Institute of Philosophy (HIW) at the KU Leuven. After a MA in Philosophy (KU Leuven, 2014) and a MSc in Sociology (KU Leuven, 2015) he started a PhD in philosophy (funded by FWO) at the Institute of Philosophy at the KU Leuven in 2015, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Cortois. He defended his PhD in 2019, entitled "The Raven and the Trojan Horse: Constructing Nature in Synthetic Biology". It focused on the recent emerging discipline of synthetic biology, which aims to understand life by synthesising it in the lab, and how to understand this discipline in the light of constructivist claims in philosophy of science.
From 2019 to 2022 he did an FWO postdoc at Ghent University, under supervision of Prof. Maarten Van Dyck, focusing on the concept of 'technoscience'. The goal was to investigate how the concept is understood by numerous philosophers and sociologists and to confront these conceptions with contemporary technoscientific fields such as synthetic biology and data science.
