Biography

Vincent Straub (he/they) is a researcher, artist, writer, and coder based at the University of Oxford, working across Oxford, London and Berlin. He has a multidisciplinary background in social, computer and medical sciences, and visual art, and is interested in working on arts, science and policy projects that adopt a participatory, care-centered lens, rooted in current societal issues.

Vincent first studied for a BA in International Development at King’s College London. He then worked at a number of cultural and policy organisations including Nesta, the UK's innovation agency for social good, before being awarded an Oxford Internet Institute scholarship to study for an MSc in Social Data Science at the University of Oxford. He later briefly pursued additional studies at the Berlin University of the Arts, collaborated with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and worked for the Leibniz (IGB) and Alan Turing institutes, before returning to Oxford to study for a PhD.

Vincent is currently an MSCA Doctoral Fellow in Population Health at Oxford, a Research Scholar for Our Future Health and a Research Fellow for the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys. His primary doctoral research combines social epidemiology, genetics and computational social science to study developments in population health, with a focus on male reproductive health and health risk behaviours, alongside research ethics and topics in data and AI governance. His academic work has been published in journals including Nature Aging and Nature Genetics, while his public writing has appeared in newspapers including The Guardian and Financial Times. He has been interviewed by outlets including the BBC, The Independent, The Telegraph, and others.

As a practising multimedia artist, Vincent exhibited his first work in 2016 as part of the group exhibition What is the future of art? in Tate Modern organised by Tate Collective. He has since exhibited work in group exhibitions in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum with the Blikopeners art collective, alongside spaces in Oxford, Brussels and Berlin, among others. Informed by an ethics of care and at times involving participatory or site-specific elements, his practice spans video, photography, drawing and installation. Ongoing projects include Prototyping a Plural Archive of Care, a collaborative project bringing together health research, artistic practice and community engagement. His videos, photography and poetry have been shown and featured by the Tate Collective, the Mays Anthology and Aeon, among others.

Committed to international collaboration, Vincent has worked with the Jubel European Democracy Festival and served as a member of the European Cultural Parliament Future Generation. He has helped deliver workshops for children, students and academics at museums and universities in Oxford, London and elsewhere.

Beyond his academic education, he has participated in extracurricular seminars that have informed his practice, including by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.