I am starting a 3-year postdoctoral research fellowship with Vincent Müller in the Centre for Philosophy & Artificial Intelligence Research (PAIR) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. In Spring 2023, I completed my doctorate in philosophy with doctoral minors in neuroscience and cognitive science at the University of Arizona in the USA. I defended my dissertation Robust Normativity in Complexity Science with Sara Aronowitz (co-adviser), Mark Timmons (co-adviser), Jonathan Weinberg, and Allen Buchanan.
Philosophy pitch: I specialise in the philosophy of neuroscience and cognitive science, moral psychology, and the philosophy of biology. A common theme throughout my work is that normative standards are indispensable for telling us what about complex adaptive systems to explain. I argue that there are many types of norms and each play different roles in functional explanation, mechanistic explanation, and radical interpretation across biology, neuroscience, psychology, and AI. I suggest that normative standards can only play these indispensable roles if they are objectively and irreducibly normative. I hold my philosophical work accountable to advancing decision-making in the sciences, so I am especially interested in exploring how these issues apply to task design in judgment and decision-making (JDM).
Science pitch: I am interested in bridging the theoretical and methodological gap between the neuroscience of cognitive control (e.g., in stop-signal, Stroop tasks) and the psychology of metacognitive control (e.g., in JDM tasks). I argue that metacognitive control is different in kind from cognitive control, but I draw on models of cognitive control to build neurobiologically plausible models of metacognitive control. Drawing on my philosophical work, I specialise in designing experimental paradigms that use performance metrics (which categorise behavioural responses as correct vs. incorrect) to adjudicate between mechanistic models of reasoning and other cognitive processes that are less understood. During my postdoctoral fellowship, I plan to explore strategies for implementing theoretical models of reasoning in AI.