Ohad Parnes

Ohad Parnes studied in the Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, focusing on Biology, Philosophy, and the History of Science. He completed a Master's degree at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, earning his PhD in 2001 with a dissertation on the origins of the notion of specific agency in nineteenth-century physiology and medicine. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London and the University of Bern before leading the Knowledge of Life program area at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin. He later held professorships at the Open University of Israel and the Central European University in Budapest. At the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, he served as Research Coordinator from 2015 to 2023 and as Research Scholar in the Department on Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge (Renn), before moving to the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life (Benson) in 2025. In 2022, he co-founded the Elkana Forum with Katja Krause. 

Ohad's main research interests include the history of the life sciences and modern medicine, as well as the impact of the AI revolution on the history of knowledge.