Quill Kukla Researches Spatial Information in Germany With Prestigious Humboldt Award

Quill Kukla is a professor of Philosophy, a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the editor-in-chief of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. She recently received the Humboldt Award making her one in only a hundred people around the world to receive this highly coveted award.

The award is given to scholars whose work has had a significant impact in their field and spotlights those expected to continue their innovative research throughout their career.  The Humboldt Foundation award was created for scholars from all disciplines and nationalities to work in Germany for up to one year, collaborating on long-term research projects alongside colleagues at an academic institution.

“I’m extraordinarily honored to receive this award,” says Kukla, “I already have wonderful, exciting connections to colleagues in Berlin and Hannover, and much of my own research recently has focused on the city of Berlin itself, so this will be a fantastic opportunity to further my own research, collaborate, and build connections.” Kukla says her research will focus on geographic knowledge and the representation of spatial information. “I also have important side projects that I will be pursuing – one on socially charged public speech and one on street art and its role in placemaking, territory and place identity,” says the professor, a core faculty member of Georgetown’s Disability Studies program.

Kukla describes her research as “quirky and off the beaten path,” so she found it exceptional to receive an award that is usually reserved for more traditional research.

They were nominated for the award by Mathias Frisch, a physicist and professor of philosophy at Leibniz University because of the Georgetown professor’s published work on the role of values and interests in scientific methodology and in shaping scientific concepts, particularly in medicine. Kukla has written on public health ethics, the ethics of health communication, research ethics, methodological issues in medical research and the social epistemology of medicine.

They say these academics are “deeply interested in the role that social interests play in shaping scientific methodology, research programs and the communication of scientific knowledge.”

Before coming to Georgetown, Kukla served as co-coordinator for the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Network and from 2003-2005 was a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University. 

They also will help create a collaborative network among philosophers at Leibniz University Hannover and at the Technical University of Berlin.  

“The Kennedy Institute and the philosophy department are immensely proud of Quill’s work and are pleased to see them given the international recognition this prize implies,” says Daniel Sulmasy, KIE’s acting director. “They clearly deserve this award and we look forward to reading the results of their ongoing work in philosophy.”

Original Article (https://college.georgetown.edu/news-story/professor-to-research-spatial-information-in-germany-with-prestigious-humboldt-award/)