JTEM (Julia) Rijssenbeek

Julia Rijssenbeek is a PhD researcher in Philosophy and Ethics of Technology. She focuses on the philosophical and ethical implications of hybrid life forms in synthetic biology and their role in a bioeconomy. In biotechnological fields like synthetic biology, life and technology meet in new and more intimate ways. As such, our understanding of what life is and of what technology is are pushed in new directions. Concepts like life and technology, machines and organisms, and values like natural and sustainable can be disrupted. Julia’s research is part of the Gravitation program Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT). During her PhD research, Julia was a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, applying and developing the model of Collaborative Ethics in the lab. Next to that, she is a researcher at the future studies think tank FreedomLab. In interdisciplinary projects, she explores and speculates on future human-technology-nature relationships through art. Her film Cobalt (2024) was selected for the International Science Film Festival Nijmegen.