About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. I am also a Faculty Affiliate at the SRInstitute for Technology and Society (University of Toronto), an IMH Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities (Durham University), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Along with Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Kino Zhao, I am a co-director of the Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis (APDA) project.

Prior to joining Durham, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie University (2021–2024), where I also taught in the Faculty of Computer Science. Before that, I held a Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020–2021) at Mila - Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal. There, I studied ethically aligned artificial intelligence with Yoshua Bengio (Mila, UdeM, CIFAR) and Dominic Martin (UQàM).

I was also a Postdoctoral Fellow (2020–2021) in the Department of Philosophy and the SRI at the University of Toronto. In this role, I examined issues related to the legal and social regulation of artificial intelligence, as well as foundational ethical and philosophical questions surrounding AI and emerging technologies.

I received my PhD in 2020 from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, under the supervision of Jeffrey A. Barrett. My dissertation, “Complex Signals: Reflexivity, Hierarchical Structure, and Modular Composition”, develops an account of how language may have evolved through the modular composition of communicative structures. My dissertation committee included Jeffrey A. Barrett (Chair), Brian Skyrms, Simon M. Huttegger, and Cailin O’Connor.

I previously earned an MA in Social Science (2018) from the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UC Irvine, an MA in Philosophy (2016) from Simon Fraser University, and a BA (Hons.) in Philosophy and English Literature (2014) from the University of British Columbia.

My Erdös number is 4, along the following path:

       Jeffrey A. Barrett → Brian Skyrms → Persi Diaconis → Paul Erdös