Julia Sánchez-Dorado

Julia Sánchez-Dorado is a philosopher and historian of science whose work explores how scientific models, especially in the Earth sciences, contribute to our understanding of complex phenomena while informing policymaking. Her research interests also include the problems of representation, creativity, and abstraction in science and art.

Julia received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from University College London in 2019. She then became an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University of Berlin (2020–22) and a ‘Talent Postdoc’ researcher at the University of Sevilla, Spain (2022-2025). She has also been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2020), the University of Vienna (2022), and the Smithsonian Institution in D.C. (2023).

While models are essential tools for understanding the Earth’s dynamics, they also function as key instruments of scientific advice in political debates about environmental risks and futures. This project investigates how modelling practices in Earth and climate sciences are translated into public decision-making and used to inform policy. By focusing on issues of scale, complexity, and idealization, it examines how scientists can employ models not only to predict probable scenarios, but also to provide robust advisory input for designing governance strategies under deep uncertainty.

Through the promotion of epistemic pluralism in modelling practices, the project aims to enhance the reliability of science advice for public policy, strengthening risk assessment and prevention frameworks –particularly in relation to flood control strategies and climate adaptation planning.

The aim of this project is to investigate the cognitive resources that scientists use to construct successful models of parts of reality. Good models often represent highly complex natural or social systems in a simple, idealized, and abstract way. Advancing a comprehensive explanation of this puzzling fact can be most fruitfully achieved if a philosophical analysis of how models represent is combined with empirical and historical evidence of how actual scientific communities make model-target (or model-world) comparisons in their practices.

Accordingly, this project uses historical sources, as well as evidence from recent field work and interviews, to study several modelling practices in twentieth-century geosciences aimed at informing risk-assessment processes (i.e. the implementation of flood control strategies, volcanic and seismic prevention plans, climate change policies). The project will show that, beyond similarity (or the mere copying of nature) and reduction (or the mere omission of complexities), modelling practices incorporate and standardize a variety of creative cognitive resources.