Melike Şahinol (Dr. rer. soc.) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Orient-Institut Istanbul affiliated with the Max Weber Foundation and head of the research area »Human, Medicine and Society«.  Şahinol studied sociology, political science, and psychology at the University of Duisburg-Essen and received her doctorate in 2015 in sociology at the Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen. Sponsored by a three-year scholarship at the DFG Research Training Group Bioethics at Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen (Germany), Şahinol examined the adaptation of humans and machines in neuroscience in particular Brain Machine Interfaces in patients with chronical stroke. She conceptualized this process as socio-bio-technical adaptation process. With the context of her PhD project, she was involved in several international neuroscientific research projects and has conducted ethnographic studies in hospitals, laboratories, and during various brain surgeries.

In her current projects Şahinol continues to develop her concept of socio-bio-technical entities from a posthumanities lens. In her project Additive Manufacturing: Enabling Technologies in the Childhood she analyses the development of 3D printed prosthesis for children and disability beyond the technological fix narrative.

Şahinol received several grants and fellowships, including one at the program on »Science, Technology and Society« (STS) at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She led the founding of the Turkish Scholarly Network for Science and Technology Studies (STS TURKEY). As one of the co-coordinators, she co-organized several conferences and STS workshops in order to make STS more transparent and inclusive also for supporting young scholars in Turkey. She continues to provide contributions to the establishment of STS in Turkey.

Şahinol, M. (2020). My Cyborg Performance as a Techno-Cerebral Subject. In  Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor & Heidi Figueroa Sarriera (Eds.) Modified: Living as a Cyborg (pp. 197-211): Routledge.

Şahinol, M. (2019). Collecting Data and the Status of the Research Subject in Brain-Machine Interface Research in Chronic Stroke Rehabilitation. In: Somatechnics 9.2-3 (2019): 244–263, Edinburgh University Press.