Let us introduce you to our team members! To find out more about a researcher, click on their picture to open their University of Antwerp researcher page. 

Kristien Hens is professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp. She loves microbes and the sea. She teaches courses in bioethics, media ethics and Japanese concepts of nature. Her research focusses on concepts of biology, ethics of biotechnology, bioethics-in-science, transdisciplinarity, environmental ethics and ethics of psychiatry. She wrote Chance Encounters and Towards an Ethics of Autism.

Nele Buyst is doing a Phd project that explores the potential of aesthetic practices to heal modern relations to surroundings. She is interested in feminist arts-based research methods, ecofeminism and posthumanist philosophy. Alongside her research she publishes poetry and is an editor of the magazine for culture and critique Rekto:Verso. She is involved in Metrodora and the Centre for Ethics.

Franlu Vulliermet is doing a PhD focusing on relationships with the environment in the context of epigenetics and pollution informed by Non-Western perspectives. He is interested in moral philosophy, metaphysics, and mountains.

Varsha's research focuses on the ethical aspects of Synthetic Biology (SynBio). More specifically, she is interested in the human and environmental justice aspects of SynBio. She aims to create an ethics-by-design toolkit that would act as a guiding tool for adopting an ethically oriented approach in SynBio.

Emma Moormann is a postdoctoral reseacher with a broad range of interests mostly related to (bio)ethics. She loves being outdoors, eating cookings and petting cats. She has worked on topics such as the ethics of epigenetics, stepparenthood, parental responsibility, philosophy of disability and neurodiversity theory. From 2025 onwards, she will be the postdoc-manager of the SBO project Death Care. 

Ina Devos is a PhD student working on the interdisciplinary Beyond the Genome-project investigating ethical issues in large-scale proteomics research. They have an academic background in both bioethics and biotechnology, from which they try to build horizontal collaborations between ethics researchers and proteomics researchers. Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, inspiration and intervention play an important role in their research.

Gert-Jan Vanaken is a postdoctoral researcher with a passion for bottom-up organising and activism. His academic work draws on philosophy of disability, care ethics and neurodiversity studies and aims to contribute to emancipatory, neurodiversity-affirmative autism care. Together with colleagues, he currently works on the development of a new, critical autism psycho-education programme and an Autism Advocacy Academy for autistic, emerging adults. A general audience nonfiction book about the neurodiversity movement is in the pipeline.

Julie’s focus of interest is the wellbeing of neurodivergent people. She aims to build bridges between neurodivergent people and scientists who are active in the field of neurodiversity. She is also a clinical psychologist who supports neurodivergent children, adolescents and their families. She uses a neurodiversity-affirming systemic approach and strongly believes in the power of a good person-environment fit. When she is not working, she can be found in her vegetable garden, chicken coop or craft room.

Suvielise Nurmi is a visiting postdoctoral researcher at Compost Collective (2024-25). Her research interests include environmental philosophy, ethical theory, philosophy of mind and action, and interdisciplinary research on biodiversity conservation and sustainability transformation. She is currently developing a conceptual framework for Relational Sustainability Ethics (2024-27). She is the author of Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics.

Christina researches how to re-negotiate the relations we humans have with our environment. She is a scientist by education and has worked in the artistic field for many years. Her current project Bactohealing revolves around KinTsugi, a transformative repair technique from Japan. She investigates the concept of healing in an academic trans-disciplinary setting between art, biotechnology and philosophy. In her experiments she explores how to involve mycelium to create a living scar in broken ceramics, and the ethical implications of working in microbiological laboratories. She holds a postdoc position at UA and at UGent. Other nodes of her practice include the long term platform “Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity” and her artistic research on oracles and prognostication tools.

Imane Kostet is a postdoctoral researcher in cultural sociology. She conducts research on symbolic boundaries, with a focus on ‘ethnicisation’ and racialization of social differences. In her current study, Imane examines how ethnicity and race become (in)visible in how autism is constructed and represented as both a medical category and an identity. She is also co-supervisor of the FWO-SBO project Death Care.