Melanie Marcel

I work on how research and innovation systems shape our societies, and how they can be redesigned towards social and environmental justice.

My background is in engineering, physics, and neuroscience. I began my career working on brain–machine interfaces and in research environments where questions of societal relevance were often left implicit, rather than actively designed into the work itself.

In 2013, I founded SoScience, a company specialized in responsible research and innovation: a framework that structurally integrates social and environmental impact into research projects and research policies. In that role, I worked for almost 15 years with leading research institutions and industrial actors across Europe and internationally.

This work led to millions in funding mobilized for impact-oriented projects, nearly 10,000 researchers trained or sensitized, and contributions to policy developments at European and international levels on responsible and collaborative research frameworks. I also wrote my first book on responsible innovation, and worked as an expert and advisor, including with the European Commission.

Today, I share reflections grounded in this experience and the questions it raises: how research agendas are shaped, who gets to define what knowledge is worth producing, whose problems are considered legitimate, and how institutional logics decide what gets funded, scaled, or ignored. Alongside this, I openly share tools, methods, and frameworks built over the years with hundreds of actors across academy, industry, and civil society, for those who are willing to change these systems.