is professor of Science Studies at ETH Zurich and member of »Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung«, the Leopoldina, and of »Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen«. He studied Medicine and Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, where he also worked as a neurophysiologist after graduating. He was a visiting scholar at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London before working at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science in Lübeck, at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He was visiting professor at the universities of Salzburg, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt Main and Cologne. He is also awarded winner of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Science and of the »Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung«. He was awarded the 2008 Sigmund Freud prize for his scientific prose writing.

teaches History at the St. Gallen University. Between 2007 and 2010, Hirschi was a Research Fellow at Clare Hall College, Cambridge, where he taught the history of modern Europe at the Faculty of History. During this period, Hirschi started a new comparative project on the roles of official experts and public critics in the French and English Enlightenment. Since 2006 Hirschi has been a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.