I received my Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of San Diego in 2012 with majors in philosophy and psychology. I am deeply interested in issues at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. While an undergraduate, I worked at a UC San Diego’s Schizophrenia Research Lab where I gained firsthand experience running neuropsychological tests with patients with severe and persistent mental illness. We know that schizophrenia is a brain-based disorder, but our understanding of the mind and its relation to the brain is still in its infancy: Why does this particular brain have these types of hallucinations? Why does the brain produce experiences in the first place? I completed a Master of Arts in philosophy at Northern Illinois University in 2015, where I continued to study the philosophy of science and the prospects of a physicalist solution to the mind-body problem.

As a graduate student, I studied philosophy of biology and that nature of life at the Center for the Study of Origins under the supervision of Director Carol Cleland. This fellowship, combined with my previous research on mind, caused me realize that much of the work being done in the ethics of AI was disconnected from the actual science. My research attempts to remedy this deficit. I have developed a technological-systems account of AI research products that better captures their underlying metaphysics. My framework—in direct opposition to the dominant, machine-based perspective—accounts for the complex relations that obtain between human and machine parts of technological systems. Only by focusing on the larger system that humans and machines are embedded in can we begin to develop practical solutions to the ethical issues raised by advanced AI technologies.