Cristina is an ethnographer of medical science and biomedicine. She received a PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Edinburgh in 2025. She also holds an undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences (with specialisation in infectious disease science) (University of Edinburgh, 2014) and a master’s degree in medical anthropology and global health (Universitat Rovira i Virgili/Universitat de Barcelona, 2017). She is a member of the Epidemy Lab, focused on the history of epidemiological reasoning, based at the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) department at the University of Edinburgh.

Her thesis, titled Optimising antibiotics in the Spanish public hospital: professional belonging, consciousness and power at the edge of intervention, explores how healthcare professionals imagine, design and practice antimicrobial governance in the Spanish public hospital. Based on a multisited ethnography focused on the medical interventions known as Programas para la Optimización del Uso de Antimicrobianos (PROA)—the primary AMR solution in human health in Spain—, the thesis delves on issues of friendship, apprenticeship, rhetoric and power between the diverse disciplines and specialties involved in PROA interventions. Using a combination of concepts, methods and tools derived from STS, medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine, glimpses of the political, material and affective realities of optimising antibiotics come to the fore throughout the chapters. Ultimately, the thesis theorises PROA interventions as generative of ‘spaces of optimisation’, where PROA practitioners and their colleagues reckon with and calibrate their actions to improve patients’ antimicrobial treatments all the while becoming collectively conscious of the limits of their intervention.

Cristina’s doctoral training and research has received funding from an Alice Brown Fellowship Award (2019-2025) at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, the ERASMUS+ training/teaching programme (2023), a Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) Saltire Early Career Research Award (2022), and the European Research Council (ERC) project Epidemy (TER).

Besides her doctoral research, Cristina has participated in other research projects at STIS, including topics concerned with synthetic biology and COVID-19. Between 2020 and 2024, Cristina acted as managing editor of the diamond open-access journal Medicine Anthropology Theory (MAT).

Further information on Cristina is available on her personal website and her institutional profile.

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