Dr. Emanuele Ratti

Emanuele Ratti hold a PhD in Ethics and Foundations of the Life Sciences from the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM) in Milan, Italy. He has worked for almost five years at the University of Notre Dame (in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and in the Technology Ethics Center), and he is now based at Johannes Kepler University Linz, in the Institute of Philosophy and Scientific Method.

His areas of specialization are the History and Philosophy of Science (molecular biology, genomics, and AI), and Ethics of Science and Technology (including virtue ethics). He is interested in the aspects of the natural sciences and data science that stand at the intersection of ethical and epistemic questions. In particular, he has two research trajectories.

First, he works in the history and philosophy of the life sciences. His work so far has been focused on the relation between computer science and the life sciences (genomics and biomedicine). He uses philosophical, computational, and historical resources to explore this topic.

Second, he investigates how ethical and epistemic considerations interact and shape one another in data science. He uses an approach (called ‘microethics’) that prioritizes the analysis of the minutiae of the practice of data scientists and the moral relevance of each of their technical acts. This approach integrates the virtue ethics tradition with philosophy of science, in order to identify where the ethics emerges in the practice.