Senior researcher Science and Society, KU Leuven

Michiel van Oudheusden researches how science, technology, and innovation (STI) are governed in diverse sociotechnical fields, including new and emerging technologies, digital healthcare, and sport and recreation. From 2008 to 2012, he reflected with Flemish nanoscientists and technologists on how nanotechnologies shape new, collective futures. This exploration resulted in his PhD thesis on the politics of participation in technology assessment. While based at the University of Liège (2012-2015), he compared Flemish and Walloon STI policies. In 2015, he joined the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre SCK-CEN, where he studied safety and security governance, citizen-driven radiation monitoring, and reached out to policymakers, scientists, members of civil society, and the public at large, with a view towards inciting responsible research and innovation in the nuclear field. From 2019 to 2021 he was employed as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he researched and facilitated interactions between grassroots citizen science groups and formal institutions, such as public authorities and research communities. He is a cofounder and coordinator of the FWO-funded Belgian Science, Technology and Society network (B.STS).

In his previous MSCA research project GRACE (supervised by Prof Jennifer Gabrys), he studied and facilitated interactions between grassroots citizen science groups and formal institutions, such as public authorities and research communities, with the aim of developing mutually responsive environmental governance approaches.