Michael Hagner is professor of science studies at ETH Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland) and co-led the Science and Philosophy Between Academia and the Public Sphere project.

Hagner studied medicine and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) from 1980-1986. After earning an MD in 1986, he worked as a neurophysiologist at the FU Berlin. In 1989, he was a visiting scholar at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. He worked at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science in Lübeck (Germany) from 1989-1991 and at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Göttingen (Germany) from 1991-1995, where he obtained his habilitation at the Medical Faculty (1994). In 1995 he joined the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Hagner was visiting professor at the Universities of Salzburg, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt am Main and Cologne. He was a fellow at the Collegium Helveticum (2001), at the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung in Berlin (2006, 2007 and 2010), at the Maison des Sciences de L’Homme in Paris (2008), and at IFK Wien (2015-2016).

He is the recipient of the Prize of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Science (2000); the Sigmund-Freud-Preis für Wissenschaftliche Prosa by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (2008); the Wissenschaftspreis der Aby Warburg-Stiftung (2014); and the Martin-Warnke-Medaill (2014).