Lea Lösch is an Assistant Professor at the transdisciplinary Athena Institute at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research explores how digital approaches can expand the spaces and modes through which diverse actors are heard, participate, and co-create knowledge in transdisciplinary research. She focuses on combining digital and computational methods with participatory approaches as innovative and potentially more inclusive ways to address complex societal challenges, including healthcare and beyond. In doing so, she engages with questions of how diverse forms of knowledge are produced, valued, marginalized, and integrated in these processes.
Her work is informed by her disciplinary background in sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), as well as her expertise in mixed methods, computational methods, and inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches.
In her PhD research, Lea investigated how digital methods may provide an innovative way to diversify the knowledge available in evidence-based medicine. Specifically, her project explored how natural language processing (NLP) can be used to incorporate patients’ experiential knowledge from online sources into public health and clinical guidelines, with the aim of supporting more inclusive and higher-quality guidelines.
