Dagmar Schäfer (Germany) is Director of the Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as Honorary Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Northwest University, Xi’an. Before taking up her current positions, she was Chair of China Studies and History of Technology at the University of Manchester (2011–2015).

A sinologist and historian of technology and science, she has published widely on the premodern history of China (Song-Ming), materiality, and the processes and structures that lead to varying knowledge systems. In 2020, Schäfer was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the DFG (German Research Foundation) for her development of new approaches to cultural studies and the resulting comparative perspectives on a comprehensive global history.

Her monograph, The Crafting of 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), received the Pfizer Awards and Joseph Levenson Book prize. Recent publications include Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023), coedited with Annapurna Mamidipudi and Marius Buning and the working group volume Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues (Brill, 2023), coedited with Glenn W. Most and Mårten Söderblom Saarela. A forthcoming monograph co-authored with Giorgio Riello focusing on an asynchronous comparison of silk in Renaissance Italy and Yuan China is expected to appear this year with Princeton University Press.

Md Saidul Islam (Singapore) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Postgraduate Coordinator at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. A former Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), his research sits at the intersection of environmental sociology, international development, and the socio-political dynamics of neoliberal modernity. His work focuses on climate justice, food systems, and sustainability, particularly in the Global South, and contributing to debates on biocultural worlding, relationality, and human–nature entanglements.

Dr. Islam’s (PhD, York, Canada) publications include Climate Change and Food Security in Asia Pacific: Response and Resilience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and his forthcoming book, The Anatomy of Revolt: The July Revolution and the Struggle for Democracy in Bangladesh, will be published by Oxford University Press.

Prior to NTU, he taught at York University in Canada and the College of William and Mary in the United States. In the CBCW, he will advance interdisciplinary dialogues on biocultural relations, knowledge co-production, and planetary futures.

Lisa Onaga (Germany)is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), investigating the production, ownership, and authorship of knowledge in agricultural, laboratory, health, and industrial settings.

Her book Cocoon Cultures: The Entanglement of Biology and Silk in Japan (Duke University Press, forthcoming), examines how environmental and genetic control of an insect for industrial silk manufacture underpins the history of the life sciences in Japan. Onaga’s publications include “Making Animal Materials in Time” in Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences (2023); “Insect Histories” Focus in Isis (2024); and most recently, the Osiris volume “Animal Mobilities” (2025).

At the MPIWG, she has led the “Proteins and Fibers: Scaffolding History with Molecular Signatures” Working Group, exploring multidisciplinary methods to study biological materials. Additionally, Onaga leads the “Reclaiming ‘Turtles All The Way Down’” Working Group, which studies human-animal relations in Indo-Pacific systems to engage in biocultural histories. This project builds upon her research while she was an assistant professor in the History Programme of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2012–2017), and will contribute to the CBCW (2026–2031).

Suelyn Tarris (Germany) is the Scientific Coordinator of the Max Planck-NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW) at the MPIWG. She supports the establishment of the Centre's structures and contributes to its programmatic and administrative coordination, working closely with the CBCW teams in Berlin and Singapore. She holds an M.A. in Culture, Aesthetics, and Media from Hochschule Düsseldorf and is a certified public funding manager in EU and German federal frameworks.

Before joining the MPIWG, Suelyn worked as Program Officer at Cultural Vistas gGmbH in Berlin, where she coordinated the Climate Action Artist Residencies, an international artist residency program at the intersection of artistic practice and climate science in the Indo-Pacific, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. Prior to that, she coordinated publicly funded projects at the Dachverband der Kulturfördervereine in Berlin.

Mei Jia Ng (Singapore) is the Scientific Coordinator of the Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding at NTU CCA Singapore. She coordinates the research and administrative components, working with her counterpart in Berlin to establish the foundations of the Centre. She was previously a research associate managing the projects Climate Transformation Programme (2024–2027) and Developing and Evaluating Digital Tools for Participatory Climate Change Mitigation (2025–2026), and was a research assistant on Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss (2021–2024), Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (2021–2023), and Understanding Southeast Asia as a ‘Geocultural’ Formation (2021–2023). She is interested in the study of artistic and cultural practices inflected by spirituality and religion, understood as forms of cosmo-ecological intervention.

She was previously a Project Officer (Intangible Cultural Heritage) at the National Heritage Board, Singapore. Mei Jia holds an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore.