Born in Argentina, where I attended the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, I received a BA from Harvard University, graduate degrees from the Universities of Geneva and Paris, and a Habilitation from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Before moving in 2018 to the field of medical anthropology, I worked as historian of the human sciences from the Renaissance to the present. I was Guggenheim Fellow, Athena Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome and at Harvard University, Fellow at the Brocher Foundation, Visiting Professor in Buenos Aires, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico and Kyoto, and permanent senior investigator at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. I was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2017, and in 2021 received the Carlson Award "in recognition of extraordinary scholarship in the history of the human sciences."

How do values and the production and application of scientific knowledge interact in particular contexts to shape views and practices of the human? How have debates about personhood and personal identity been dealt with in history and in the present, and what is their real-life impact? Such questions run across my main research interests. These long concerned the history of psychology and the mind/brain disciplines from the early modern “sciences of the soul” to contemporary neurosciences. Since about 2018, I explore the same questions mainly in the perspective of bioethics and medical anthropology and phenomenology. One ongoing project, which involves researchers, patients and caregivers in Europe and Japan, focuses on how the experience of the locked-in syndrome articulates with individual and interpersonal subjectivity. Another explores how views and practices of personhood and personal identity are enacted in the care of persons with dementia with the help of social robots.