I'm Lecturer (i.e. corresponding to US tenure-track assistant professor) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. I hold a PhD in Ethics and Foundations of the Life Sciences from the European School of Molecular Medicine (aka SEMM). This was the first graduate program on planet Earth to systematically embed philosophers in biomedical labs. I hold a Master in philosophy of information from the University of Hertfordshire, where I was supervised by Luciano Floridi.
I worked as non-tt assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Scientific Method at Johannes Kepler University Linz from 10/20 to 12/22. Before JKU,…
I'm Lecturer (i.e. corresponding to US tenure-track assistant professor) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. I hold a PhD in Ethics and Foundations of the Life Sciences from the European School of Molecular Medicine (aka SEMM). This was the first graduate program on planet Earth to systematically embed philosophers in biomedical labs. I hold a Master in philosophy of information from the University of Hertfordshire, where I was supervised by Luciano Floridi.
I worked as non-tt assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Scientific Method at Johannes Kepler University Linz from 10/20 to 12/22. Before JKU, I have worked for almost five years at the University of Notre Dame, first as a postdoc, and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values (with a joint appointment in the Technology Ethics Center). I have been instructor in the CODATA-RDA Schools of Research Data Science, and I am regular visiting fellow at Technion.
My areas of specialization are the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (molecular biology, genomics, and AI), and Ethics of Science and Technology (including virtue ethics). I am interested in the aspects of the natural sciences and data science that stand at the intersection of ethical and epistemic questions. In particular, I have two research trajectories.
First, I work in the history and philosophy of the life sciences. My work so far has been focused on the relation between computer science and the life sciences (genomics and biomedicine). I am interested in understanding how biology and computer science shape one another. I use philosophical, computational, and historical resources to explore this topic. I hope that this research trajectory will shed light on the general theme of the relation between technology and science.
Second, I investigate how ethical and epistemic considerations interact and shape one another in the data science process. I use an approach that I call 'microethics', because it prioritizes the analysis of the minutiae of the practice of data scientists and the moral relevance of each of their technical acts. I integrate traditional applied ethics works with philosophy of science (in particular philosophy of modeling, philosophy of data-intensive science, and philosophy of science and values) in order to show where the ethics emerges in the practice. I have applied this idea to teaching data ethics to data science students (in the CODATA-RDA context with Louise Bezuidenhout), by providing a solid theoretical foundation to the idea of 'embedding ethics in the practice of science'. I am adapting this framework to the biomedical environment in the context of a Horizon Europe project (more info soon). Finally, I integrate this microethics with the capability approach to build a prototype that can be used for auditing in the context of medical AI (this work is funded by IBM and the University of Notre Dame).
