I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow studying technology ethics at Texas A&M.

I worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor for two years at Fort Lewis College after receiving my Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2022.

My research focuses on the ethics of emerging technology; I have published on autonomous weapons, AI value alignment, and social media.

I have taught 30 sections of philosophy over 10 distinct courses, and I have developed two courses on the ethics of emerging technologies.

My Philosophical Journey

I received my Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of San Diego in 2012 with majors in philosophy and psychology. I have always been 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 the 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, led me to believe that much of the work being done in AI ethics was disconnected from the actual science. My research attempts to remedy this deficit.

Philosophy Outreach

At CU Boulder, I was the head of the Philosophy Outreach Program of Colorado for four years. In that role, I helped bring philosophical topics to high-schools around the state and extended our programming to elementary and middle schools. I scheduled roughly 80 visits with graduate student philosophers from CU Boulder, taking 15 visits myself. A primary goal of mine as coordinator was to bring philosophical topics to underrepresented populations, including metro Denver high schools. I left public school without knowing what philosophy was. I’m therefore passionate about bringing philosophy to students who might not have heard of the subject otherwise.