Dr Daniela Boraschi
Dr Daniela Boraschi is a social scientist and design scholar examining the co-production of knowledge, technology, and society in biomedical discovery science. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), design, and education, her work explores how these relationships are shaped within the everyday practices of science, and how they can become sites for creative, collaborative ethical reflection and intervention.
Her interdisciplinary approach builds on over twenty years of experience across academia, educational publishing, and the creative sector. Her CHASE AHRC-funded PhD (2019) on the history of cervical cancer prevention examined the construction of evidence around HPV-based preventative technologies, highlighting the inseparability of knowledge-making and ethical responsibility, and foregrounding the need for earlier and stronger connections between science and society.
Daniela’s postdoctoral research extends this work into machine learning in biomedicine. Collaborating with scientists, creative practitioners, and public engagement scholars, she is developing experimental tools and methods to support scientists’ engagement with emerging ethical and epistemic challenges. Her work moves beyond compliance-based governance by framing ethical responsibility as an ongoing process of dialogic reflection, negotiation, care and learning within scientific practice.
Daniela is an Isaac Newton Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education. She is a member of the Cambridge Science, Technology and Society Network (SCaN), and the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research group (CEDiR). She previously held academic roles at the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public, where she contributed to numerous public engagement initiatives, including ‘The Hopes and Fears Lab’ and the Alumni Festival debate “This House believes that public opinion has no place in science”; as well as in the Departments of Sociology of the University of Cambridge and the University of Essex. She also worked as a designer, developing participatory mapping systems with communities undergoing regeneration, and designing science books for young readers.
Select publications
- Boraschi, D., van der Schaar, M., Costa, A., & Milne, R. (2025). Governing synthetic data in medical research: The time is now. The Lancet Digital Health, 7(4), e233–e234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landig.2025.01.012
- Milne, R., Galloway, C., Rashid, M., Boraschi, D., Burch, C., & Middleton, A. (2024). The hopes and fears lab: Enabling dialogue on discovery science. JCOM: Journal of Science Communication, 23(07), N05. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.23070805
- Middleton, A., Costa, A., Milne, R., Patch, C., Robarts, L., Tomlin, B., Henriques, S., Atutornu, J., Aidid, U., Boraschi, D., et al. (2023). The legacy of language: What we say, and what people hear, when we talk about genomics. HGG Advances, 4(4), 100231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xhgg.2023.100231
- [book designer] Dorling Kindersley (DK) (2014) Heads Up Philosophy. DK: London, New York, Melbourne, Munich and Delhi
- [book designer] Dorling Kindersley (DK) (2014) Heads Up Psychology DK: London, New York, Melbourne, Munich and Delhi
- [book designer] Dorling Kindersley (DK) (2013) Knowledge Encyclopedia – DK Smithsonian Knowledge Encyclopedia. DK: London, New York, Melbourne, Munich and Delhi
Select awards
- 2026 – Best Poster Presentation Award. Poster title: ‘Ethics beyond compliance: Embedding dialogic reasoning in biomedical digital twins’ research practices’. Perspectives on the Societal Impact of Digital Twins Conference, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
Further links
ORCID: 0000-0003-2200-0303
[https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2200-0303]
