Kamil Ahsan

I’m a doctoral student in the History of Science and Medicine (HSHM) program, interested particularly in environmental history and the history of coral reef sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I received a BS in Biology from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, an MA in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science (CHSS), and a PhD in Developmental Biology, both at the University of Chicago. For my MA, I utilized my evolutionary-developmental (evo-devo) biology training to think about narratives of the evolutionary and environmental history of coral research, using a multi-scalar approach across many different ways of looking at coral by ‘zooming out’ from the genomic and cellular scales, to the developmental, evolutionary Earth systems science and/or ocean chemistry scales. My current research goal is to form a methodology that allows different forms of knowledge to talk to one another for a historical narrative of coral reefs, while historicizing the work that allows for such a narrative to be possible.