Hagner, Michael

Biography

Michael Hagner has been Full Professor of Science Studies at the ETH Zurich since October 2003. Born in 1960 in Bochum, Germany, Michael Hagner studied Medicine and Philosophy at the Free University in Berlin. After gaining his M.D. in 1986, he worked as a neurophysiologist at the FU Berlin. In 1989, he was a visiting scholar at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. He worked at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science in Lübeck (1989-91) and at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Göttingen (1991-95), where he obtained his habilitation at the Medical Faculty (1994). In 1995 he received a Heisenberg grant from the German Research Foundation and moved to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Since 1997 he has been senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute. Hagner was visiting professor at the universities of Salzburg (1998), Tel Aviv (1999), and Frankfurt am Main (2000), and a fellow at the Collegium Helveticum (2001). He has been awarded the Prize of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Science in 2000. In 2008 he was awarded the Sigmund-Freud-Preis in scientific prose by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.

Research Interest

Historical epistemology of the human sciences, strategies of visualization in the life sciences including the relationship between art and science, history of cybernetics.