Maria Fernanda Olarte Sierra

Maria Fernanda Olarte Sierra studied anthropology at the University of los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Before graduating she joined the university’s Medical Anthropology group, doing research primarily on infectious diseases in Colombia, particularly, on dengue. She is still a research member of the group.

In 2003 she came to the Netherlands to undertake her master’s studies in Medical Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.  Her research interest revolt around on how (new) medical technologies reconfigure people’s experience of health and illness, while at the same time such technologies are contesting ideas regarding the beginning and the end of life. She did her master’s thesis on Intensive Care Nurses’ coping strategies. The title of such work is ‘Surviving machines: On how nurses cope with suffering, death and medical ideology in an Intensive Care Ward’.

In January 2006 María Fernanda Olarte Sierra started her Doctoral research titled ‘Achieving the desirable nation. Antenatal testing and abortion in Colombia. The case of Amniocentesis’; a study founded by the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (NFP). The study combines Medical Anthropology’s and Science and Technology Studies’ perspectives.

In her research, Olarte Sierra looks into the way in which antenatal testing technologies shape –and are shaped by- legal changes and socio-cultural practices, values, and believes. She is particularly interested in looking at the role played by antenatal testing technologies in both the recent abortion de-penalisation (2006), and in the long lasting practice of abortion in cases of a diagnosed foetal alteration. The specific antenatal technology that Olarte Sierra studies is amniocentesis, a technology to test for the foetus’ genetic and chromosomal status.

Olarte Sierra’s promoters are Dr. Stuart Blume and Dr. Amade M’charek of the University of Amsterdam, and of Dr. Roberto Suárez M. of the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá).

María Fernanda Olarte Sierra has also been a teacher assistant to Professor Sjaak van der Geest and later to Dr.  Alexander Edmonds in the Amsterdam Master’s in Medical Anthropology in the modules ´The anthropological perspective’ and ‘Introduction to Medical Anthropology’.