Studied Political Science and History at the University of Vienna (Austria). In 2001/2, through the Erasmus Exchange Program, she spent the academic year at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). In 2002, she became Tutor in Sociology at the Technical University in Vienna. In the following year, she became Student Assistant of Herbert Gottweis at the Department of Political Science in Vienna. Michaela participated in the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection (UK), attending courses in Discourse Analysis and qualitative research methods (summer 2003 and 2004). After completing her Master’s thesis The Politics of Technically Engineered Food, she became doctoral researcher in a project on biobanks and health governance funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. In 2004, Michaela was a Visiting Researcher at the Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé et Société (CERMES) in Paris (France) and lectured in the following year at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on how meaning is given to biomedical practices and the gouvernance of life sciences.
Currently, she finalises her PhD thesis on biobanking, co-supervised by Herbert Gottweis of the Life Science Governance Research Platform, University of Vienna (Austria) and Jean-Paul Gaudillière of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France). Since February 2008, she is Management Assistant to the Pan-European Biobanking and Biomolecular Research Infrastructure (BBMRI) at the Medical University of Graz (Austria). E-mail: