I am a postdoctoral associate (starting in Fall 2024) in the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and I will join the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) as assistant professor in Fall 2025. In 2023–2024, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy & Artificial Intelligence Research 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 under the co-supervision of Sara Aronowitz and Mark Timmons.
I specialise in general philosophy of science, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of biology. My research explores the relationships between various forms of explanation in neuroscience and psychology—especially functional analysis, rational analysis, mechanistic explanation, design explanation, and teleological explanation. I am particularly interested in ontological questions about scientific explanations—such as their accuracy and completeness conditions and their ontological commitments. I am also interested in the ways that experimental design (especially task design) is guided and justified by explanation.
A recurring theme in my work is that normative distinctions—such as between success and failure, rational and irrational, function and dysfunction—direct us to give different kinds of explanation for things with different normative status. Persistent disagreements about normative standards and their role in the science of reasoning, judgment, and decision-making constitute the so-called Great Rationality Debate, so I draw many of my case studies from these literatures.