A Short Bio
I hold degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (BA in Philosophy 1998) and the London School of Economics (PhD in Philosophy 2004). Currently, I'm an Associate Professor in the Philosophy
Faculty and the Director of the Diploma Programme at the New
College of the Humanities. I also serve as a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and spend some of my free time developing the app The Logic Calculator. In recent years, I was a Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Prior to that I spent several years at the University of Düsseldorf, where I occupied a number of positions including that of Assistant Director and Research Fellow at the Düsseldorf Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science. I have also been a Visiting Research Fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and the Department of Methodology, History and Theory of Science at the University of Athens as well as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol.
My main area of expertise is the philosophy of science, particularly the scientific realism debate, but I also have active research interests in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of artificial intelligence and meta-philosophy. Research that I conducted into these areas has been furthered via a number of grants, particularly from the German Research Foundation (DFG), for which I am very grateful. My work has been published in several journals including Philosophical Studies, Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and Synthese.
Together with various colleagues, I edited a number of special issues on themes like the democracy, public debate and political decision-making, computationalism and the philosophy of information, underdetermination of theory by evidence, the role and value of novel predictions in confirmation, the nature of unification and coherence and the extent to which observation is theory-laden. I have also co-edited the European Philosophy of Science Association 2013 Conference Proceedings (Springer 2015).
I'm currently co-PI on a TIER1-funded project that seeks to experimentally study: (i) the way people learn logical reasoning skills, (ii) how their learning strategies evolve over time and (iii) the optimal way to acquire such skills. The project deploys machine-learning to identify patterns of learning behaviour as well as to intelligently adapt content delivery.
For more details and an up to date version of my CV please download: CV JUNE 2020 [PDF]