Paul Trauttmansdorff

Paul Trauttmansdorff is a Friedrich Schiedel Fellow at the TUM Think Tank, where he researches the evolving role of facial recognition technologies in medicine and healthcare. His project is called: "Coding Faces in Medicine. Exploring the societal and ethical challenges of facial recognition technology in medicine and healthcare".

He is a postdoctoral researcher in the social studies of science and technology. He is based at the Chair for Philosophy and History of Science and Technology, located at the School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich. His research focuses on imaginaries and infrastructures of datafication. He is particularly interested in how bodily data is produced, valued, circulated, and stored, and in how these practices shape forms of knowledge and governance in areas such as security, surveillance, and medicine. His latest project examines the use of face recognition for purposes of diagnostic medicine and healthcare. His publications include The Digital Transformation of the European Border Regime (2024) and Technopolitics and the Making of Europe. Infrastructures of Security (2024).

Paul completed his bachelor’s degrees in philosophy at the University of Vienna, and economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, followed by an MSc in Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. During his doctoral degree in science and technology studies, he explored the collective visions of border security that underpin the development of large-scale databases for migration governance in Europe.

Paul completed his PhD research as a fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2022 at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna. He previously held postdoctoral positions at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, and at the Chair for Sociology of Technology at the European New School of Digital Studies, European University Viadrina.