Dr Roberta Pala is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies at The University of Sydney. Her research draws on Science and Technology Studies (STS), Feminist STS, social theory, biopolitics and sociology of health. Her work looks at the entangled nature of social and scientific events and considers biological interventions and technological artefacts as material sites of political investigation. She gained her PhD in Social Policy from the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Roberta's doctoral thesis analysed the politics of vaccines as formed through their materiality and biological workings and considered this materiality to be relational and situatedly enacted.

Her current work investigates human-microbial relations in the context of maternal bodies and the role of the microbiome in family practices of care.