A new Max Planck Research Group on "Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences" is to open at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in July 2021. The Research Group will elucidate validation practices in the modern biomedical sciences with the aim of historicizing validity as a relational property. What methods and concepts are used to ascertain the quality of scientific research? How has validity been established, measured, and advocated? 

The group will be led by Dr. Lara Keuck, currently a Research Scholar at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where she leads a Branco Weiss Fellowship-funded junior research group on the history of biomedical models of mental illness.

Keuck was previously a Research Scholar in the MPIWG Research Group "Twentieth-Century Histories of Knowledge about Human Variation," led by Dr. Veronika Lipphardt (2013–15). Her publications include G. Keil, L. Keuck and R. Hauswald (eds, 2017), Vagueness in Psychiatry (Oxford University Press); L. Huber and L.K. Keuck (2013), “Mutant Mice: Experimental Organisms as Materialised Models in Biomedicine,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44: 385–391; and L. Keuck (2018), "Diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease in Kreapelin’s Clinic, 1909–1912," History of the Human Sciences 32 (2): 42–64.