ISoS News

We are excited to welcome Dr. Marcus Carrier, who has joined ISoS in April 2026 as a postdoctoral researcher in the new research project „Edition Wissenschaftliche Software“ (EWS), funded by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

In the EWS project, researchers from the universities of Bielefeld and Aachen as well as from the Deutsches Museum in Munich will focus on collecting, preserving and studying sources related to the digitalization of the sciences in the second half of the twentieth century.

As a member of the Bielefeld project site, Marcus will concentrate on collecting and processing software and documents, as well as conducting oral history interviews - particularly in the field of chemistry - in close collaboration with the teams in Aachen and Munich. A special focus of research at the Bielefeld project site will be on instrument software; for example, programs used for the analysis of NMR or IR spectroscopy, as well as simulation software for reaction pathways. While methods such as NMR or IR have significantly shaped how chemistry is practiced, the corresponding software has so far received rather little attention as a subject of study in its own right. Marcus’ research interests range from the history of science, medicine, and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, over how computational methods shape science, to expertise, the development of forensic sciences, and the ways gender and the body are conceptualized within the sciences.

Marcus holds a PhD in History from Bielefeld University on a work on chemical expertise in 19th-century poisoning trials  in Franco-German comparison. Prior to finishing his PhD, he studied History and Chemistry (BA) as well as History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science (MA) at Bielefeld University. Before joining EWS, Marcus was a research associate in the history of science at TU Berlin from 2024 to 2026. Further stations include a short-term fellowship at the Science History Institute, Philadelphia, US (Fall 2022), a Junior Fellowship at the Käthe Hamburger Kolleg "Cultures of Research" at RWTH Aachen (2023–2024) as well as a Career Bridge scholarship of the Bielefeld Young Researchers' Fund in Bielefeld (2022–2023).

We are delighted to have Marcus on board!

If you’re interested in learning more about Marcus’ research:

Carrier, Marcus B. Der Wert von Methoden: Forensische Toxikologie des 19. Jahrhunderts im deutsch-französischen Vergleich. Springer VS, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41633-1.

Hocquet, Alexandre, Frédéric Wieber, und Marcus B. Carrier. „And the Winner is…Alphafold!“ Society for Social Studies of Science – Backchannels, 9. Februar 2025. https://4sonline.org/news_manager.php?page=39360.