Dr Sara Bea

Biography

Dr Sara Bea is a social scientist with an MSc and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Edinburgh. 

She received an ESRC doctoral scholarship to explore the clinical practice and public policy of organ donation. She conducted a hospital ethnography in a hospital in Barcelona with world-leading rates of organ donation. The outcome was delivered as policy briefings on best strategies to increase national organ donation rates to the Scottish Parliament and Westminster. Read her thesis 'No heroics, please: mapping deceased donation in a Catalan hospital'

She recently completed a postdoc in Linköping University where she worked on Steve Woolgar's VR grant project to develop Science & Technology Studies in Sweden.

Sara's work is ethnographical and located broadly in the biomedical domain. At King's she will be joining Amy Hinterberger's project 'Biomedical research and the politics of the human' and conducting research on the development of organoids and interspecies chimeras for human therapeutic applications.

Sara is also the Chair of the Biotechnology and Society Research Group.

Research interests

• organ donation
• organ transplantation
• ethnographic methodology
• public health policy
• biomedical research
• stem cell biotechnologies
• organoids
• interspecies chimeras

Current research

Dr Sara Bea's work is ethnographical and located broadly in the biomedical domain. She is a researcher that grapples with provocative topics in search of new theoretic-methodological trails and creative interventions. Her work is empirical with a strong theoretical disposition. She enjoys tweaking STS-inflected tools that go against the (essentialist, humanist, modernist) grain and generating novel re-articulations of challenging matters. Her writing aspires to open up analytical interstices between critique and justification.