Research Interests: History of geology and seismicity; history of early modern earth science; carbon capture and sequestration; visual representation in earth sciences; STS.

Ana Luiza Nicolae began exploring history of science through the pre-modern world. With an undergraduate thesis, she focused on the role of winds in ancient Mesopotamia and Greece, in relation to the built landscape, orientation, navigation, and ritual. In her undergraduate studies, she created and followed a special curriculum studying human interaction with the environment, and her methods are profoundly interdisciplinary.

Ana Luiza's interests lie in tracing the evolution of geological concepts pertaining to the structure of the earth and the mechanisms which lead to its transformation, such as earthquakes. She studies concepts such as porosity and seismicity, which are key to understanding how humans have theorized the interaction between fluids and the underground over time. With a Master’s dissertation, she has researched the distribution of earthquakes in Antiquity and their relationship to theories about windy or watery fluids flowing through porous earth. She has also looked at early modern soil science, debates over porosity in 20th century petroleum geology and more recently, the increasingly policed pore space of the earth’s crust employed for carbon sequestration and other injection of fluids. The links between the earth’s structure and risks such as seismicity are core to Ana Luiza’s interests, and she hopes to connect her studies to stories of human adaptation and resilience in the face of natural disasters and landscape changes. Throughout her studies, she has aimed to keep a component of science communication and community engagement, and will keep making this an integral part of her research.

Presentations:

“The Operationalization of Porosity between Petroleum Geology and Reticular Chemistry” conference paper given at the ICHC13, 13^th International Conference for the History of Chemistry in Vilnius, Lithuania, May 2023.

“The Geometrization of Winds in Antiquity”, conference paper given at the Postgraduate conference of the British Society for the History of Science in Oxford, UK, March 2023.

Previous Degrees:

B.A., Geography and Identity (Special Concentration), Harvard College

M.Phil., History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge