Sandra Mitchell
I received a BA in Philosophy from Pitzer College in Claremont, California; an MSc in Logic, Philosophy and Scientific Method from the London School of Economics and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. I taught at the Ohio State University (1984-1989), the University of California, San Diego (1989-1999) before returning to Pitt's HPS Department in 2000. I have been a research fellow at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinare Forschung, Universität Bielefeld, Germany (1991-1992), at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1993-1994), Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh (1999), Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne (2004-2005), and a visiting scholar at Witten/Herdecke University (2008) and Max Planck Institute for History of Science ( 2010).
I have had the good fortune to collaborate with many scientists, including Robert E. Page, Jr. (School of Life Sciences, ASU) on modeling division of labor in honey bees, Wolfgang Streeck (Max Planck for the Study of Societies, Cologne) on complexity and the economy, and most recently Angela Gronenborn (Structural Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine) on protein structure experiment and prediction.
I am the author of Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity and Policy, University of Chicago Press, 2009; Komplexitäten. Warum wir erst anfangen, die Welt zu verstehen, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008 and Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
I edited Symposia Papers, Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association Philosophy of Science, Volume 71, Number 5, 2004; Contributed Papers, Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association Philosophy of Science, Volume 70, Number 5, 2003. I co-edited Ceteris Paribus Laws, (with John Earman and Clark Glymour), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, and Human by Nature: Between Biology and the Social Sciences, (with Peter Weingart, Peter Richerson and Sabine Maasen), Erlbaum Press, 1997.
Professional Associations
I am past president of the Philosophy of Science Association and serve on its governing board until December 31, 2020. My term as president ran from December 31, 2016 - December 31, 2018. I was program chair for the PSA biennial meeting in 2002 and a founding co-director of the Joint Caucus for Socially Engaged Philosophers and Historians of Science.
I served as "Member-at-Large" of Section L: History and Philosophy of Science, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and for six years on the scientific program committee for the annual meeting of AAAS, and in 2016 was inducted as a fellow of the AAAS.
I served on as a Steering Committee Advisor for Bio-Techno-Practice, an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars engaged in joint conferences, publications and investigations into science, engineering and philosophy.
I am actively involved with the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science, where I have served on the governing board and organized symposia at the biennial conferences.