Cristina Moreno Lozano, PhD candidate in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh is doing a research stay at  CareNet 

Cristina Moreno Lozano investigates the medical work carried out by healthcare professionals running antibiotic optimisation interventions in Spanish public hospitals.

Cristina’s PhD explores how health professionals coordinate their work to deliver antibiotic optimisation programmes (known as “Programas de Optimización de Uso de Antimicrobianos”, PROAs) in Spanish public hospitals. It is informed by an eighteen-month ethnography being carried out between 2021–2023 and grounded on an approach that combines science and technology studies (STS) and medical anthropology. Cristina’s research is timely; as the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) increasingly becomes acknowledged as a threat to the efficacy of antibiotics–and consequently, an impediment to the practices of medicine, food industries and agriculture that have historically built on the use of these drugs –original social science research is proving imperative. PROAs aim to institutionalise the effort to improve antibiotic prescription and mitigate the problem of AMR in the clinical spacce. With a focus on PROA teams, her work sheds light on the working conditions and the ethical commitments that arise from the aspiration of “optimising” these medicines. By using ethnographic and archival research methods innovatively, her thesis shows the day-to-day of these interventions, problematising how material infrastructures, labour economy and ethics intersect in shaping these professionals’ experiences of running these interventions in their hospitals.

As part of her stay at the CareNet research group in the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the UOC, Cristina will actively participate in the group’s activities, visit some relevant archives for her research in the city of Barcelona, as well as present her research project and emerging results in a seminar co-organised with Prof Israel Rodriguez. The seminar will take place on XXXX.

About her

Cristina Moreno Lozano is a PhD candidate in science and technology studies at the University of Edinburgh and a research associate at The Epidemy Lab project (PI Lukas Engelmann). Since January 2020, she’s also the managing editor of the flagship open-access journal Medicine Anthropology Theory (MAT) hosted at the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA). Her research has received funding from an Alice Brown scholarship at the University, as well as from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), the ERC The Epidemic Revolution project and the Erasmus+ programme. Cristina holds a BSc in biomedical sciences (with specialisation in infectious diseases) from the University of Edinburgh and a MSc in Medical Anthropology and Global Health from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili and the University of Barcelona.