Lisette Jong is a researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. She is part of the Transforming Excellence project that is embedded in the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) of which CWTS is a founding partner. In this project Lisette explores how different notions of ‘excellence’ figure in research funding organizations. Notions of excellence have become ubiquitous in the research ecosystem but are often not at all or rather narrowly defined and used in ambiguous ways. Lisette is interested in how different notions of excellence are used in everyday practice. What are the affordances and limitations of these different uses? And what (if at all) could be the future of ‘excellence’?

Lisette is currently completing her PhD research at the University of Amsterdam. As part of a project on the absent presence of race in forensic identification technologies, she conducted ethnographic research in the field of forensic craniofacial depiction. In her dissertation she writes about how notions of race persist in everyday methods and technologies used to predict a facial appearance based on the skull of an unknown individual. Lisette holds a BSc degree in Sociology and a MSc in Social Science from the University of Amsterdam. She also published on forensic DNA technologies, race and racism in the context of a murder case in the Netherlands.