(l-r) Prof Susi Geiger (lead), Ongolly Fernandos, Dr Olya Loza and Gemma Watts
Prof Susi Geiger – Principal Investigator
Susi Geiger is the Principal Investigator on the MISFIRES project and a Full Professor of Marketing & Market Studies in the College of Business, University College Dublin.
In her research she tries to figure out how complex markets are organized, with specific interests in technology and healthcare markets. Her approach is leaning on traditions from Science and Technology Studies and Actor Network Theory. She has published numerous articles in outlets such as Organization Studies, Research Policy, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Research andMarketing Theory. She has also addressed issues of fairness and justice in markets in an edited volume entitled “Concerned Markets: Economic Ordering for Multiple Values” (Elgar 2014, with D. Harrison, H. Kjellberg and A. Mallard).
Outside academia, Susi does Yoga, runs and reads – if she’s not backpacking somewhere in the world with her family.
e: susi.geiger@ucd.ie
t: @complexmarkets
Dr Tineke Kleinhout-Vliek – Research Assistant
Tineke Kleinhout-Vliek’s research and interests lie in critical 
pharmaceutical studies, focusing on medicine availability & access and patient engagement & activism. She joined MISFIRES as a researcher in Pharmaceutical Market Contestation following a postdoc on social innovation in the pharmaceutical field (Utrecht University, the Netherlands, including a research visit to Sheffield, UK). Such SI initiatives comprise new, collaborative ways to address the well-known problems around the availability, accessibility, and affordability of treatments, and she studied these as part of a four-year collaboration with colleagues in Brazil, Canada, and France.
Tineke loves continually expanding her international and interdisciplinary network. She also does this through the Global Pharmaceuticals and Society Studies (GPSS) Network she helped set up, which plays host to webinars, workshops, and conference tracks.
Originally trained in biomedical research (BSc and MSc Molecular Life Sciences), Tineke really found her groove during three months of fieldwork in India for her second MSc (Development & Rural Innovation, with distinction). Here, she researched how India managed to get rid of the patent on an expensive leukaemia medicine despite international patenting legislation indicating otherwise.
Tineke’s PhD dissertation (Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2020) examined how policymakers decide what forms of health care should and should not be reimbursed through Dutch collective health care insurance. She particularly examined the societal weighing phase of such decisions using insights from Science and Technology Studies literatures.
Tineke is fascinated by ideas and always enjoys discussing them, whether over coffee or in a lecture hall. She enjoys exploring new-to-her places with her husband and their two wee girls.
e:tineke.kleinhout-vliek@ucd.ie
Dr Olya Loza – Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Olya has joined MISFIRES after completing her PhD with Dr Philip Roscoe at the University of St Andrews, in which she looked at how the graduate labour market is organised through recruitment practices. She was then able to follow her interest in how markets come into being and are maintained – and how they (re)shape the actors implicated in them and the world which they form part of – in the context of health and healthcare during her time as a Qualitative Research Fellow with the HATUA and CARE projects, also at St Andrews. During that time, her interest in health and illness and markets that emerge around them deepened and developed and she was able to closely attend to the intertwined material, economic, social, political, and cultural concerns that give shape to the antibiotics market.
Olya deeply cares about not only what she researches, but her responsibilities as a researcher and member of the academic community. She tries to work towards caring, nurturing relations both within her research – in particular, focusing on various forms that care might take within the markets that she studies – and outside of it, as a worker in solidarity with other workers, as an ethnic Ukrainian fighting for peace in the country where she grew up, but also as a friend, a daughter, and a colleague.
e: olga.loza@ucd.ie
Fernandos Ongolly -PhD Student
Ongolly has a background in Medical Anthropology and lots of interests in Health Innovation, Behavioural Science and Implementation Science. He has wide experience of conducting qualitative research in both rural and urban Kenya focusing on sexual and reproductive health. Prior to joining MISFIRES, he worked at the Kenya Medical Research Institute as a social scientist and a technical advisor for a project implementing pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in public HIV clinics in Kenya. He was also involved in studies that focused on innovative HIV prevention technologies such as HIV self-testing kits, adherence monitoring/support devices and mobile apps. Ongolly also worked with the University of Nairobi Innovation Fellowship as a mentor in the East African Problem Based Learning Innovation C4D lab where he integrated his knowledge in Medical Anthropology with Design thinking. Out of work, he leads a group of non-medical scientists advocating for access to health information among vulnerable populations under an umbrella group named Africa Health Activists (AHA). He joins MISFIRES to research on the rollout of PrEP in Sub-Saharan Africa with interests on mapping out the role of activists among other PrEP actors in influencing the scaleup of PrEP as a HIV prevention intervention.
e: Fernandos.Ongolly@ucd.ie
t: @kredgie
Gemma Watts – Research Project Manager
Gemma Watts is the Research Project Manager for 
MISFIRES and is
responsible for the research project support and contributes to the research outreach. The role includes many aspects such as financial, administrative, human resources, training, dissemination and reporting. Gemma previously worked on other large EU funded projects, after working in the central research administrative unit in UCD. Gemma previously chaired the UCD Research Managers and Administrators Network (URMAN) and is a qualified PRINCE2 project manager.
Outside of work: Gemma is a leader at Brownies, which is part of the Irish Girl Guides and enjoys travelling with her family.
e: gemma.watts@ucd.ie
t: @JimmyJammy09
Associated Researchers
Dr Neva Bojovic
Dr Neva Bojovic is Assistant
professor of Strategy at Kedge Business School in Bordeaux. She defended her PhD at Grenoble Ecole de Management, and her PhD was done as a part of a Marie Currie Project CHESS (Connected Health Early Career Support System). Her research focuses on technology emergence, especially the socio-cognitive aspects on the emergence and commercialization of new technologies. Neva is Associate Researcher for Misfires. In this project, she works with Dr. Susi Geiger on investigating the emergence of a new field around the issue of Anosmia, i.e. the loss of sense of smell.
Outside of work, Neva spends time with her family, explores the city and the surrounding area of Bordeaux, and enjoys running, cooking and photography.
t: @nevabojovic
Dr Théo Bourgeron
Théo Bourgeron has a background in economic sociology and was a teaching and research fellow at Sciences Po. He graduated with a joint master’s degree from Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris-Saclay) and Sorbonne Université, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof. Donald MacKenzie and Prof. Valérie Boussard. He was also a visiting research scholar at UC Berkeley’s sociology department.
Théo’s research has been focused on understanding the construction and functioning of financial markets from a critical perspective, using ethnographic observations, interviews, and archives. During his PhD research, he has focused on understanding the rise of the private equity sector in France. To do so, he has used a wide range of theoretical frameworks, including STS, neo-institutionalism and capitalism studies. He has got articles published or accepted in the Journal of Cultural Economy, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales and Historical Social Research.
From 2019 – 2022, Théo was part of the MISFIRES project and investigated the contestation of healthcare markets as a new empirical object. In particular, he studied the struggle of activists against the opacity surrounding the profits, costs and prices of healthcare companies.
Outside of work, Théo enjoys hiking, climbing, comics, rain and geopolitical podcasts.
Dr Gianluca Chimenti
Gianluca Chimenti is a researcher at the Stockholm School of 
Economics, from which he received his PhD in 2021, focusing on how strategic efforts of various actors change how markets work and change over time. Having a strong interest in misfires, over the past few years he has published work exploring the role of controversies and conceptual ambiguities in the organization of so-called sharing economy markets, specifically concentrating on shared mobility markets (e.g. car sharing, ride sharing, bike sharing). Building on this, he has explored the relationship between platforms and markets; how they manifest in urban space through networked infrastructures and how those infrastructures are built, financed, owned and controlled. This, by necessity, required an inquiry into the far-reaching effects of
marketization not only on the organizations driving the change, but also on the wider
market network, including regulators, movements, tech-firms, competition authorities and
more peripheral actors seeking to partake in the ongoing platformisation of society.
Drawing on STS, geographies of marketization, and valuation studies, his current research
revolves around market change in context of the emerging markets for psychedelics. As
affiliate researcher of the MISFIRES team, he specifically investigates issues of patenting, de-
regulation and scientific colonialism in the context of drugs used for treatments of
psychiatric disorders, such as Psilocybin.
His qualitative research methods span from in-depth interviews, via participant observations
to archival field work. His research has been published in Organization Studies, Environment
and Planning A and Consumption Markets & Culture, among others.
t: @sharingGia
Dr Ilaria Galasso
Ilaria Galasso has a background in Ethical and Political Philosophy and
Philosophy of Science. Before joining “MISFIRES” and UCD, she was a doctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary PhD program “Foundations of Life Sciences, Bioethics and Cognitive Sciences” at the European School of Molecular Medicine based in Milan, Italy, in partnership with the European Institute of Oncology and with the University of Milan.
Her doctoral research, developed within an STS framework, analyzed the emerging medical approach of precision medicine from an ethical and political perspective, by considering the possibly deriving benefits and their distributions in relation to social and health equity. Her research methods included documents analyses and qualitative interviews to relevant experts.
Ilaria’s research interests relate to issues of distributive justice and of equity in the context of health and healthcare, in connection with social inequalities and the social determinants of health, and with accessibility and inclusivity of health research and care.
e: ilaria.galasso@ucd.ie
t: @ilagalasso
Dr Nicole Gross
Dr. Nicole Gross is a Lecturer in Marketing
at the National College of Ireland (Ireland). Having worked previously as a postdoctoral research fellow and lecturer in UCD, Nicole is involved as an associate researcher in “MISFIRES”. Her research interests include high-tech marketing, practice-research, entrepreneurship, business models and market innovation, particularly in complex markets like healthcare.
Her research has been published in journals including Organization Studies, Business & Society, Marketing Theory and the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research.
Outside of work, Nicole loves spending time with her family, sports, reading and cooking.
Recent publications include:
Gross, Nicole; Byers, Vivienne & Geiger, Susi (2021) “Digital Health’s Impact on Integrated Care, Carer Empowerment and Patient-Centeredness for Persons Living with Dementia”, Health Policy and Technology, 100551, ISSN 2211-8837, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hlpt.2021.100551.
Geiger, Susi & Gross, Nicole (2021) “If it’s free, you are the product – The perils of assetizing consumers’ genetic profiles”, Business & Society
Geiger, Susi & Gross, Nicole (2021), “A tidal wave of inevitable data? Assetization in the consumer genomics testing industry”, Business & Society, Vol. 6(3), 614-649 https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650319826307
e: Nicole.Gross@ncirl.ie
t:@tech_spaces
Dr Nicola Mountford
Nicola is a lecturer in Management
at Maynooth University’s School of Business. Her research interest is in how governments and inter-organizational networks can together find an optimum balance between the efficiency of a market and the social responsibilities of a state. Nicola held a Fulbright TechImpact Scholar Award, 2016-17 in the area of eHealth and has published papers in journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Business Research, the International Journal of Integrated Care, and Journal of Medical Internet Research (Research Protocols). Outside work Nicola is a keen badminton player and enjoys family hikes in the Mourne Mountains.
Recent publications include:
Mountford, Nicola & Geiger, Susi (2021), “Markets and institutional fields: foundational concepts and a research agenda”, Springer
Mountford, Nicola and Geiger, Susi (2020) “Duos and Duels in Field Evolution: How Governments and Interorganizational Networks Relate”, Organization Studies 41 (4), 499-522. https://doi.org/10.
e: nicola.mountford@mu.ie
t: @nmountford
