University of Oxford

Catherine Montgomery

Catherine Montgomery is a Research Fellow in Bioproperty at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. In 2010 she completed her PhD entitled ‘The Co-production of Gender & Technology in HIV Prevention Research’ at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.  She then held an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Science & Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) at the University of York.

Catherine’s research interests lie at the nexus of medical sociology, science & technology studies and global health.  To date, her work has focused on the following key areas:

• The sociology of biomedical innovation in transnational contexts, with a particular emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. Catherine has worked extensively on the co-constitution of prevention technologies and their users in malaria and HIV research.
• The spatiality of clinical trials and the social life of methods in transit.  Catherine has plans to explore how the methods and materials of the randomised controlled trial work as social agents, active in configuring particular forms of subjects, publics and understandings of science in European and African contexts.
• Communication between different epistemic communities, such as STS and global public health.  Catherine is interested in how knowledge studios, collaboratories and other innovative knowledge practices potentially allow those who produce new technologies and those who analyse them to collaborate in critical, productive and experimental ways.

Catherine is currently working on ‘BioProperty: Biomedical Research and the Future of Property Rights’.