Rose has a background in Chemistry and Science and Technology Studies (STS) with a focus on (techno)epistemic cultures in the natural sciences, more-than-human lifeworlds within scientific research, environmental justice and developing speculative methods as means of exploring sustainable, meaningfully democratic futures. Since May 2026, Rose has been a researcher in the project C’est La Vie: Digital Humanism in 21st Century Life Science Academia in Vienna.
Rose holds both a BSc in Chemistry and a BA in German from the University of California Davis (USA), and a MA in STS from the University of Vienna. Rose is a graduate of the The Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology, and Modern Culture (WTMC, 2024). She is currently in the progress of completing her PhD at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (The Netherlands).
During her PhD research, Rose combined STS and human geography to examine ethnographically the current transforms occurring in deep sea research cultures across various European research institutions in light of the blue energy transitions. In addition to her more socially scientific directed research, Rose reflects on deep sea futures through ethnographically situated explorations of speculative fabulation, the right to opacity, and the blending of historical and contemporary narratives of scientific exploration and research at depth.
She has also worked as a project researcher in the citizen science project, Environmental monitoring of pesticide use through honeybees (University of Graz), and as a research assistant in both STS (University of Vienna) and (In)organo-metallic chemistry (University of California) contexts. Additionally, Rose is committed to supporting emerging scholars through community-building, and creating spaces for STS activism in-and-outside of academic life worlds.
Martin Nestepny completed his MA in Cultural and Social Anthropology in 2025 at the University of Vienna with a thesis on nature conservation conflicts at the boundaries of Slovakian national parks. His comparative field research covers protected areas in central Slovakia and southern Louisiana (human-wildlife interactions with bears and wolves), the Seychelles (fisheries governance and marine spatial planning), as well as a remote sensing project funded by a grant from the European Space Agency (ESA), in which he investigated human-environment interactions in the Andaman Islands using satellite remote sensing.
Following roles at the World Bank (IFC) and the Institute for European Ethnology at the University of Vienna, he has been working at the Institute for Technology Assessment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) since 2026. In his new role, his work focuses, among other things, on AI-supported environmental monitoring technologies in the context of Austrian nature conservation and climate policy.
