David Gentilcore is Professor of Modern History at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice (and previously at the University of Leicester), with particular interests in the history of popular religion, the history of medicine and health, and the history of food and diet. His Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford University Press, 2006) was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's "Dr Jason A. Hannah medal" in 2008 and in 2012 he was awarded the "Salvatore De Renzi International Prize" for his contribution to the history of medicine, by the University of Salerno medical school and the Ordine dei Medici of Salerno. He has held visiting professorships at McMaster University (Canada) and Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), Florence, and visiting fellowships at IMéRA - Institute for Advanced Study, Aix-Marseille University (France) and the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has been the recipient of research grants from the European Research Council (a five-year Advanced Grant), the European Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship Programme, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now AHRC).

Matteo Valleriani is Research Group Leader in Dept. I, Honorary Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, Professor for Special Appointments at the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, and Principal Investigator of the Project “Images and Configurations in Corpora of University Textbooks” at the Berlin Center for Machine Learning. In his research, he investigates processes of 1) emergence of scientific knowledge in relation to its practical, social, and institutional dimensions, and 2) homogenization of scientific knowledge in the framework of Cultural Heritage Studies. Centering on cosmological knowledge, Matteo Valleriani’s current major research project is concerned with the evolution of the scientific knowledge system and with the establishment of a shared scientific identity in Europe in the period between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. In the frame of this project he also co-develops and implements multi-layered network models (sphaera.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). A further focus of his research is on the epistemic function of visual material in scientific research and in the framework of processes of knowledge transformation. Within this context he co-develops and applies machine learning technologies.