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334Authenticity and co-design: On responsibly creating relational robots for childrenIn Mizuko Ito, Remy Cross, Karthik Dinakar & Candice Odgers (eds.), Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children, Mit Press. pp. 85-121. 2023.Meet Tega. Blue, fluffy, and AI-enabled, Tega is a relational robot: a robot designed to form relationships with humans. Created to aid in early childhood education, Tega talks with children, plays educational games with them, solves puzzles, and helps in creative activities like making up stories and drawing. Children are drawn to Tega, describing him as a friend, and attributing thoughts and feelings to him ("he's kind," "if you just left him here and nobody came to play with him, he might be …Read more
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230The Role of Family Members in Psychiatric Deep Brain Stimulation Trials: More Than Psychosocial SupportNeuroethics 16 (2): 1-18. 2023.Family members can provide crucial support to individuals participating in clinical trials. In research on the “newest frontier” of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)—the use of DBS for psychiatric conditions—family member support is frequently listed as a criterion for trial enrollment. Despite the significance of family members, qualitative ethics research on DBS for psychiatric conditions has focused almost exclusively on the perspectives and experiences of DBS recipients. This qualitative study is…Read more
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48How Medical Technologies Materialize OppressionAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (4): 40-43. 2023.Biomedical practice can encode and perpetuate oppressive ideologies. This encoding and perpetuation, scholars like Liao and Carbonell (2023) convincingly argue, can occur not only via social practi...
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332Why “sex as a biological variable” conflicts with precision medicine initiativesCell Reports Medicine 10050 (3): 1-3. 2022.Policies that require male-female sex comparisons in all areas of biomedical research conflict with the goal of improving health outcomes through context-sensitive individualization of medical care. Sex, like race, requires a rigorous, contextual approach in precision medicine. A “sex contextualist” approach to gender-inclusive medicine better aligns with this aim.
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28A Feminist Approach to Analyzing Sex Disparities in COVID-19 OutcomesInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 15 (1): 167-174. 2022.Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers reported a surprising trend in disease outcomes: men were more likely to require hospitalization and die from COVID-19 than women. Researchers looked to sex-linked biology to explain these disparities, hypothesizing innate sex differences in immune function, suggesting the use of estrogens or androgen-suppressants as therapy, and even pushing for sex-specific vaccine strategies. Leading bioethicists like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel at the University of Pennsyl…Read more
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10Sex disparities in COVID-19 mortality vary across US racial groupsJournal of General Internal Medicine 35 (1). 2021.Background Inequities in COVID-19 outcomes in the USA have been clearly documented for sex and race: men are dying at higher rates than women, and Black individuals are dying at higher rates than white individuals. Unexplored, however, is how sex and race interact in COVID-19 outcomes. Objective Use available data to characterize COVID-19 mortality rates within and between race and sex strata in two US states, with the aim of understanding how apparent sex disparities in COVID-19 deaths vary …Read more
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10Is there a gender equality paradox in STEM?Psychological Science 31 (3): 338-341. 2020.Is the feminist project to bring about parity for women and men in traditionally male fields doomed? Recent headlines trumpet that "The more gender equality, the fewer women in STEM." The American Enterprise Institute proposes that it is futile to fund efforts to increase women in STEM fields, given that, “as paradoxical and counter-intuitive as it seems, female underrepresentation in STEM may actually be the result of the great advances in female empowerment, progress, and advancement that have…Read more
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280Analyzing COVID-19 sex difference claimsApa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 20 (1): 3-7. 2020.In “Analyzing COVID-19 Sex Difference Claims: The Harvard GenderSci Lab,” Marion Boulicault and Sarah Richardson summarize some of the groundbreaking work that they’re doing at the Harvard GenderSci Lab. Since March 2020, their lab has been analyzing, interrogating, and critiquing sex essentialist explanations of COVID-19 outcome disparities that are fairly ubiquitous in news media. Using interdisciplinary tools from feminist philosophy, science studies, and critical public health, they…Read more
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19The future of sperm: a biovariability framework for understanding global sperm count trendsHuman Fertility 24 (1): 1-15. 2021.The past 50 years have seen heated debate in the reproductive sciences about global trends in human sperm count. In 2017, Levine and colleagues published the largest and most methodologically rigorous meta-regression analysis to date and reported that average total sperm concentration among men from ‘Western’ countries has decreased by 59.3% since 1973, with no sign of halting. These results reverberated in the scientific community and in public discussions about men and masculinity in the moder…Read more
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59Multi-cellular engineered living systems: building a community around responsible research on emergenceBiofabrication 11 (4). 2019.Ranging from miniaturized biological robots to organoids, multi-cellular engineered living systems (M-CELS) pose complex ethical and societal challenges. Some of these challenges, such as how to best distribute risks and benefits, are likely to arise in the development of any new technology. Other challenges arise specifically because of the particular characteristics of M-CELS. For example, as an engineered living system becomes increasingly complex, it may provoke societal debate about its mor…Read more
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835Public Trust in Science: Exploring the Idiosyncrasy-Free IdealIn Kevin Vallier & Michael Weber (eds.), Social Trust: Foundational and Philosophical Issues, Routledge. 2021.What makes science trustworthy to the public? This chapter examines one proposed answer: the trustworthiness of science is based at least in part on its independence from the idiosyncratic values, interests, and ideas of individual scientists. That is, science is trustworthy to the extent that following the scientific process would result in the same conclusions, regardless of the particular scientists involved. We analyze this "idiosyncrasy-free ideal" for science by looking at philosophical d…Read more
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19How Relationships Matter: The Need for Closer Attention to Relationality in Neuroethical StudiesAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (4): 235-237. 2018.
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Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDoctoral student
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Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Biology |
Areas of Interest
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Biology |