Chairman: Prof. Frank A.J.L. James
Prof. of the History of Science and Head of Collections, Royal Institution
About: Frank James is Professor of the History ovif Science at the Royal Institution where he is also Head of Collections and Heritage. His main research concentrates on the physical sciences in the nineteenth century and how they relate to other areas of society and culture, for example art, business, media, religion, technology and the military. He edited the Correspondence of Michael Faraday now complete in six volumes published between 1991 and 2012. He has edited a number of collections of essays including ‘The Common Purposes of Life’ – a set of essays on the Royal Institution. His Michael Faraday: A Very Short Introduction was published by OUP in November 2010 and his sesquicentenary edition of Faraday’s Chemical History of a Candlewas published the following year also by OUP.

He has been President of the Newcomen Society for the History of Engineering and Technology, the British Society for the History of Science and the History of Science Section of the British Science Association. He is chair of the National Executive Committee for the 24th International Congress for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine to be held in Manchester in July 2013. He was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2012; he is also a Corresponding Member of the Académie internationale d’histoire des sciences and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers. http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayContent&id=00000001941

Secretary: Dr Anna Simmons
Honorary Research Associate, UCL
About: Dr Anna Simmons is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College, London. Her research has centred on the social history of British chemistry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a particular focus on the laboratories and pharmaceutical trade at the Society of Apothecaries and the development of chemical careers and professional organisations. She has been a SHAC Council member since 2003 and served as Hon. Secretary from 2003 to 2008. She is also editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group Newsletter.

Treasurer: Mr. Robert A. Johnstone
After graduating from UCL in 1967 (BSc Mech. Eng.), I began a career in systems engineering which morphed in business process re-engineering (the buzzword of the ’80s), IT systems and then into customer support for a cryptographic dot com boom rising star. I retired in 2010 and bought a small sail boat. Over the next three years, Vagabond and I sailed round Britain in small steps without other crew. In 2014, to keep Alzheimers at bay, I re-enrolled at UCL, this time studying in the STS department for an MSc. After a year off, I have just commenced a part time PhD into aspects of 18th Century Technology Transfer and British Government policy; and I’ve bought a new boat.

Editor of Ambix: Bruce Moran has been a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno since 1978.  His primary area of study is the history of science with a focus upon early chemistry and medicine.  In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of The Alchemical World of German Court (1991); Chemical Pharmacy Enters of the University (1991); (ed.) Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court (1991); (trans. and commentary) The Herbarius of Paracelsus (1993); (co-ed.) Disease and Medical Care in the Intermountain West (1998); Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (2005); Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Cultures with Polemical Fire (2007), (co-ed.) Bridging Traditions: Alchemy, Chemistry, and Paracelsian Practices in the Early Modern Era (2015).  Several books are in progress including “Paracelsus: Completing Nature and Restoring the Soul” and “Sentiments of Practice in Early Modern Alchemy.”  He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Kassel), a guest Professor at the Institute for the History of Pharmacy (Marburg), a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (Cambridge), and an honorary research associate at the Welcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine (London).  He has received grants from the Humboldt Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and was named his university’s Outstanding Researcher for 2009.  Most recently he has been named Dibner Distinguished Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library (2010-2011), Distinguished Visiting Faculty, Harvard University (2012-2013), and Gorden Cain Distinguished Fellow, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia (2014-2015).

Membership secretary Dr Carolyn Cobbold.
Dr Carolyn Cobbold is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University investigating food in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the mutual interactions of science, commerce, industry, government, culture, law and the media. She completed a history of science PhD at Cambridge University after a career in journalism and a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Carolyn is also actively involved in community work as project leader of a coastal planning partnership, a secondary school governor and a volunteer at a homeless hostel. In 2016 Carolyn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for her work on climate change mitigation and community engagement.

Dr Chris Campbell,
Honorary Research Associate, UCL
About: Chris Campbell is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. He graduated in chemistry and completed a history and philosophy of science PhD at UCL. His research interests are in the history and philosophy of chemistry with a particular focus on the interrelationships between the work of the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev and that of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Prof. Hasok Chang
Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/people/chang/

Dr Peter J. Forshaw
Universitair Docent (Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor) for History of Western Esotericism in the Early Modern Period at the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, University of Amsterdam
Personal webpage: Peter Forshaw

Dr Georgiana (Jo) Hedesan
Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical Humanities, University of Oxford
About: She has recently started a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Medical Humanities at the University of Oxford on the topic of universal medicine in seventeenth-century alchemical thought. She was previously a Frances A. Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute, London, and a Cantemir Junior Fellow at University of Oxford. She concluded her PhD in History at University of Exeter with the subject ‘”Christian Philosophy”: Medical Alchemy and Christian Thought in the Work of Jan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644)’.

Website Content Editor: Dr. Sarah Lang (observer)
About: Sarah is a Digital Humanities PostDoc at Centre for Information Modelling (Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung), University of Graz. She was awarded the Bader Prize for the History of Science by the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her PhD work on computational methods for the history of alchemy in 2021 which focused on decoding cryptographical stylistic devices specific to alchemy (Decknamen) on the example of chymist Michael Maier’s (1568-1622) Neo-Latin corpus. https://twitter.com/SarahALang_

Communications Editor: Dr. Megan A. Piorko (observer)
About: Meg is a historian of alchemical textual culture and technologies of secrecy. She is the Distinctive Collections Librarian at Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library. As Communications Editor for SHAC she manages the social media accounts for both SHAC and Ambix, as well as coordinates Ambix’s Edited Collections published on Taylor & Francis online.

Newsletter Editor: Karoliina Pulkkinen (observer)
About: Karoliina Pullkkinen is a final year Ph.D student at the University of Cambridge, Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Her project investigates the role of values in science, where she especially focuses on values in the development of the early periodic systems of Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev, John Newlands, and Julius Lothar Meyer. Recently, she curated an exhibition on Meyer’s  periodic systems. She also organised the Association of the Discussion of History of Chemistry (AdHoc) meetings in Cambridge in 2017-2019.

Prof. Annette Lykknes
Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim
Annette is a historian of science and professor of chemistry education at NTNU-Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and is since 2021 chair of the Working Party on History of Chemistry (WPHC) of the Europan Chemical Society (EuChemS). She is coauthor of the centenary history of the chemistry department at NTNU, Akademi og industri: Kjemiutdanning og -forskning ved NTNU gjennom 100 år (Fagbokforlaget, 2015, with Joakim Ziegler Gusland), co-editor of For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences (Birkhäuser, 2012, with Donald L. Opitz and Brigitte Van Tiggelen) and Women in their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System (World Scientific, 2019, with Brigitte Van Tiggelen), and has co-edited special issues of Centaurus (2019) and Substantia (2019) on the history of the periodic system, and of Ambix, on chemistry, women and gender (2022).

Prof. Tara Nummedal
John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History, Brown University
Tara is the John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History at Brown University (USA) and the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). With Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, she published John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History (University of Alabama Press, 2019), and, most recently, with Donna Bilak she co-edited Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), a digital publication on the musical alchemical emblem book, Atalanta fugiens (1618). She is currently working on the history of substances and techniques, including love magic, aphrodisiacs or “love potions,” and the powers of the “court favorite,” designed to control the bodies, desires, and decision-making capacity of others in early modern Europe. Her work has been supported by the the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and, most recently, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. She is Past President of the New England Renaissance Conference and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern History and Ambix. She teaches courses in early modern European history and the history of science.

Prof. Lawrence M. Principe
Drew Professor of the Humanities, Department of the History of Science and Director, Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, Johns Hopkins University
http://host.jhu.edu/bios/lawrence-principe/

Deputy Editor of Ambix : Dr Viviane Quirke
Honorary Research Associate, UCL
About: Dr Viviane Quirke is a historian of science, medicine and technology. Her special focus is on the history of biomedicine, drug therapies and the pharmaceutical industry in Britain, France and the USA in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was educated at the University of Paris X and at Oxford University, where she completed her D.Phil. in Modern History in 2000. Her work has been supported by the Wellcome Trust, the European Science Foundation, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the British Council in partnership with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, among others. She was researching and teaching at Oxford Brookes University until 2023. She is now retired and an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL as well as in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. Among her academic roles, she has been Deputy Editor of Ambix and member of the Council of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC) since 2017.

Prof. Jennifer M. Rampling
Associate Professor of History, Princeton University
About: I am a historian of medieval and early modern science and previous editor of Ambix, specialising in alchemy. In my teaching and research, I explore alchemy’s relationship with natural philosophy, medicine and culture in pre-modern Europe, focusing especially on interconnections between textual authority, artisanal practice, and alchemical imagery. My first book, The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 (Chicago, 2020), traces English alchemical ideas and practices over four centuries. My second book project investigates the visual culture of alchemy, focusing on a spectacular group of manuscripts known as the ‘Ripley Scrolls’. I am also interested in reconstructing early chemical experiments. Before moving to Princeton, I was a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

http://www.princeton.edu/history/people/display_person.xml?netid=rampling

Dr. Tillmann Taape
Book Review Editor
Tillmann’s main expertise is in the history of science and medicine in the early modern period. He is particularly interested in the ways practical and learned forms of knowledge interact in alchemical, artisanal, and medical traditions. At the moment, Tillmann is working on a history of distillation as a way of knowing the material world and the human body. Tillmann is currently a lecturer in history of medicine at the Charité in Berlin. He completed his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and has since worked as a postdoc on the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University as well as holding research fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Warburg Institute, and the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.