Roos Hopman

Roos Hopman is a postdoctoral researcher between the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is an anthropologist by training, having received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2022. Her doctoral thesis Facing Genetics focused on forensic genetic technologies used to infer the appearance of unknown suspects from DNA traces. She in particular addressed how these ‘DNA phenotyping’ technologies are entangled with categories of race and histories of racial science. After moving to Berlin in 2021 for her postdoc project Roos has turned her attention to natural history collections, continuing to develop her interest in the politics of data (collection) practices through a study of the Museum für Naturkunde’s mass digitization projects. Roos in addition has a soft spot for snails and other gooey creatures.