PhD. Nalini Kirk
Nalini Kirk is a sinologist and historian of Chinese medicine, as well as a practitioner and teacher of Chinese herbal medicine. She runs a Chinese medicine clinic in Berlin and conducts research at the Institute of Chinese Life Sciences at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Attempting to make history and practice inform each other, her research has focused on Chinese materia medica, historical case records, Chinese medical manuscripts, and interdisciplinary projects that integrate the historical practice of Chinese pharmacology with data-mining and modern biochemistry.
Currently, her special interest lies in historical recipes of Chinese pharmacology, the implicit reasoning they transmit about the nature of the world, the body, and disease, and how their therapeutic value can be transmitted into modern healthcare systems devoted to science.