Bio

Greg Lusk is an Assistant Professor at Durham University. He is an environmental philosopher of science who investigates the production, dissemination, and use of scientific information, particularly within climate science.

Research Interests

philosophy of science, science and values, climate science

Selected Publications

Lusk, G. (2022)  “Aligning Social Goals and Scientific Numbers” in Limits of the Numerical: Perspectives from Humanities and Social Sciences (eds. Anna Alexandrova, Stephen John, and Chris Newfield), University of Chicago Press.

Lusk, G. (2022) “Looking Forward and Backward at Extreme Event Attribution in Climate Policy.” Ethics, Policy, & Environment. (Available here)

Lusk, G. (2021) “Does democracy require value-neutral science? Analyzing the legitimacy of scientific information in the political sphere.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 90: 102-110. (Access here)

Lusk, G., D. Archer, and E. Kite (2020) “The Ultimate Cost of Carbon.” Climatic Change. (Available here)

Lusk, G. (2020) “Should individual extreme events be attributed to human agency?” in Contemporary Climate Change Debates, Mike Hulme (ed.), Routledge. (Publisher link)

Lusk, G. and W. Parker (2019). “Incorporating User Values into Climate Services.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (Open access: available here)

Websites

https://greglusk.com/
https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/gregory-lusk/

Bio

Ben Almassi is a Professor of Philosophy at Governors State University. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Washington, where I wrote my dissertation on the role of trust in scientific knowledge.

Research Interests

“I find myself interested in philosophical issues at intersections of social epistemology and practical ethics. For me this includes things like epistemology of testimony and disagreement, epistemology of experimentation, the role of trust in scientific practice, ethics of expertise, standpoint theory and situated knowledge, epistemic injustice, informed consent in medical research and clinical care, the nature of health and disability, community-based participatory research, and global climate change.”

Website

https://www.govst.edu/Site_Navigation/Contact/Directory/balmassi/

Bio

Leah Henderson is a professor in works in the Department of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her areas of research expertise are philosophy of science and epistemology. Dr. Henderson started her career as a physicist; she completed a DPhil in theoretical physics specialising in quantum information theory at the University of Oxford, and then worked as a post-doc in Bristol in the UK. She also holds a PhD in philosophy from MIT. Since 2015, she has been at the University of Groningen as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow.

Research Interests

Much of Dr. Henderson’s work is concerned with general topics in philosophy of science, such as the relationship between inference to the best explanation and Bayesianism. She is engaged in a project funded by the Dutch Science Foundation which concerns the reliability of sources of information, including scientific experts on issues such as climate change. She also has research interests in policy-making informed by science.

Selected Publications

Henderson, L. (2017). Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation: the case of individual vs group selection in biology. In Best Explanations: new essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, pp. 248-262, Oxford University Press, edited by Ted Poston and Kevin McCain.

Henderson, L. (2017). The No Miracles Argument and the Base Rate Fallacy. Synthese 194 (4), pp. 1295-1302.

Henderson, L. (2013). Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65, pp. 687-715.

Henderson,L., N.D. Goodman, J.B. Tenenbaum & J.F. Woodward (2010). The Structure and Dynamics of Scientific Theories: A Hierarchical Bayesian Perspective, Philosophy of Science 77 (2), pp. 172-200.

Bio

Christopher ChoGlueck (Pronounced JOH-gluhk) is an Associate Professor of Ethics at New Mexico Tech. He is a philosopher of science studying the relationships between values, evidence, and technology. Chris earned his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science, with a minor in Gender Studies, from Indiana University.

Through philosophy, he works on issues in social justice, public policy, and industry-funded research. To engage a broader audience, he writes essays about public philosophy and science communication. To get outside his head, he climbs rocks and reads comics. His daily struggle is keeping terrariums, bonsai trees, and other house plants alive in the uncooperative, desert climate.

Research Interests

Chris specializes in philosophy of science, biomedical ethics, and feminism in health policy, especially with pharmaceutical drugs. His research explores the how values and gender norms shape drug regulation at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), involving reproductive health and drug labels, and the consequences for women’s health and reproductive justice. His primary research project explores the ethics and politics of drug regulation and reproductive health. In addition to his research on biomedical ethics, he also serves as the Faculty Advisor for Responsible Conduct of Research with the NMT Office of Research and directs the Research Ethics series.

Selected publications

ChoGlueck, C. and E.A. Lloyd (2023) “Values as Heuristics: A Contextual Empiricist Account of Assessing Values Scientifically.” Synthese, 201, 220.

ChoGlueck, C. (2022). “Still No Pill for Men? Double Standards & Demarcating Values in Biomedical Research.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A. 91: 66-76. [Full Text]. Selected for Elsevier’s Special Issue for International Women’s Day 2022.

ChoGlueck, C. (2022). The FDA Ought to Change Plan B’s Label. Contraception. 106: 6-9.  [Full text]

ChoGlueck, C. (2019) “Broadening the Scope of Our Understanding of Mechanisms: Lessons from the History of the Morning-After Pill.” Synthese.

ChoGlueck, C. (2018) “The Error Is in the Gap: Synthesizing Accounts for Societal Values in Science.” Philosophy of Science. 85(4): 704-725.

Shrader-Frechette, K., & ChoGlueck, C. (2017) “Pesticides, Neurodevelopmental Disagreement, and Bradford Hill’s Guidelines.” Accountability in Research. 24(1): 30-42.

Website

https://nmt.edu/academics/class/faculty/cchoglueck/

Biography

Dr. Per Wikman-Svahn is a Researcher in the Department of Philosophy and History at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is expert on philosophical aspects of managing risks and uncertainty. He has extensive experience with scenario-methodology and research into emerging technologies and autonomous systems, including in several EU-wide research collaborations on future studies funded by the EU Research and Innovation Programmes. Dr. Wikman-Svahn leads research projects on robust decision-making for deep uncertainty and how to use future scenarios to create a sustainable and ethical adaptation to climate change, philosophical aspects of worst-case scenarios, and values in climate modelling.

Selected Publications

1. Carlsson Kanyama, A., Zapico, J.L., Holmberg, C., and Wikman-Svahn, P. (2024)  “The Greatest Benefit Is to Think Differently”: Experiences of Developing and Using a Web-Based Tool for Decision-Making under Deep Uncertainty for Adaptation to Sea Level Rise in Municipalities. Sustainability 16, p. 2044.
2. Undorf S., Pulkkinen K., Wikman-Svahn P., Bender F.A.. (2022) How do value-judgements enter model-based assessments of climate sensitivity? Climatic Change, 174(3), pp. 1–26.
3. Pulkkinen, K., Undorf, S., Bender, F., Wikman-Svahn, P., Doblas-Reyes, F., Flynn, C., Hegerl, G.C., Jönsson, A., Leung, G.K., Roussos, J. and Shepherd, T.G. (2022) The value of values in climate science. Nature Climate Change, pp.1-3.
4. Wikman-Svahn, P., (2021) The flow of values in environmental risk assessments. In Research Ethics for Environmental Health (pp. 198-208). Taylor & Francis.
5. Wedin, A., Wikman–Svahn, P. A (2021) “Value Sensitive Scenario Planning Method for Adaptation to Uncertain Future Sea Level Rise.” Sci Eng Ethics, 27, 69. (2021).https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00347-0

Website

https://www.kth.se/profile/perwi

Bio

Gah-Kai Leung (first name pronounced ‘GAR-kay’) is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at the Department of Politics & International Studies at the University of Warwick. His dissertation considers the ethical and political issues in earthquake risk management. Specifically, he focuses on the risk of catastrophic tsunami-generating earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. He is formally supervised by Simon Caney and Keith Hyams, with informal collaborators in geology and earth science including Rebecca Bell and Douglas Toomey.

He has related interests in science and technology policy; the philosophy of (social) science; social epistemology; environmental ethics; intergenerational justice; the ethics of risk and uncertainty; natural hazards; and the governance of risk and disasters. He is open to collaboration in any of these areas.

At Warwick, he is affiliated with the Centre for Ethics, Law & Public Affairs and the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group. He is also a member of the Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction at UCL.

Selected Publications

Leung, G.K. (2024) ‘Separating the Signal from the Noise in Public Health Messaging: The UK’s COVID-19 ExperienceLink opens in a new window’, American Journal of Bioethics 24(4), pp. 99-101.

Leung, G.K. (2024) ‘Unhealthy Environments Are a Problem of Structural InjusticeLink opens in a new window’, American Journal of Bioethics 24(3), pp. 53-55.

Leung, G.K., and K. Pulkkinen et al. (2022) ‘The value of values in climate scienceLink opens in a new window.’ Nature Climate Change 12: 4-6.

Leung, G.K. (2021) ‘Reducing Flood Risks for Young People in the UK Housing MarketLink opens in a new window’, in Adrot, A., R. Grace, K. Moore and C. Zobel (eds.) Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Blacksburg, VA: ISCRAM.

Website

https://gkleung.com

Biography

Rob Wilson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia. His philosophical interests are diverse, ranging across the cognitive, biological, and social sciences, as well as on occasion into the history of modern philosophy, bioethics, metaphysics within the discipline of philosophy.

For the past dozen years, he also led two large-scale projects in engaged philosophy that aim to integrate philosophical thinking more directly with community-based concerns, one focused on philosophy in and beyond schools, the other on a survivor-focused perspective on eugenics. His current projects are extending the community knowledge that stocks eugenicsarchives.ca, finishing a book on philosophical issues in kinship, and building teams of people to work at the interface of philosophy, science, and technology.

A recent interview with Richard Marshall at 3.16am gives more of an idea of stuff he has thought about, and how he got back to where he once started with philosophy.

Selected Publications

Rob Wilson is the author of over 120 articles, book chapters, and reviews. His books include the following:

• Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds (1995)
• Boundaries of the Mind (2004)
• Genes and the Agents of Life (2005)
• The Eugenic Mind Project (2018)

Website

https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/rob-wilson

Biography

Melissa Jacquart is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Cincinnati and Center for Public Engagement with Science (PEWS). She also a Faculty Affiliate in the Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Department, and the Physics Department.

Her research focuses on epistemological issues in the philosophy of science, specifically on the use of models and computer simulations in astrophysics. She also examines the role philosophy can play in general public understanding of science, and in science education. Dr. Jacquart is interested in ethics & values in science, science policy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of education, particularly developing effective teaching methodologies for philosophy.

Website

www.melissajacquart.com

Biography

Leah McClimans is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of South Carolina and Co-Director of the Ann Johnson Institute for Science, Technology, and Society. Before coming to the University of South Carolina she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics (2006-7). She also held an Ethox Research Fellowship (2009-2010) at the University of Warwick Medical School, and was awarded a Marie Curie ASSISTID fellowship to address the ethical and epistemological questions regarding the evidence base for assistive technologies at the University of College Cork (2017-2019). In 2015 she was named a Distinguished Faculty Member in the College of Arts and Sciences at University of South Carolina, and in 2016 she was awarded the Provost’s Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award. She has authored numerous articles on measurement and evidence in medical research, as well as articles in clinical and medical ethics, and is currently working on a book project, “Patient Centered Measurement.”

Research Interests

Philosophy of Medicine, Medical Ethics, Feminist Philosophy.

Selected Publications

McClimans, L. (2022) “Measurement, Hermeneutics and Standardization: Why Gadamerian Hermeneutics is Necessary to Contemporary Philosophy of Science”, in Updating the Interpretive Turn New Arguments in Hermeneutics, ed. Michiel Meijer. New York: Routledge Press.

Vanier, A., Oort, F.J., McClimans, L., Ow, N., Gulek, B.G., Böhnke, J.R., Sprangers, M., Sébille, V., Mayo, N. and the Response Shift-in Synch Working Group (2021), “Response shift in patient-reported outcomes: definition, theory and a revised model”, Quality of Life Research.  doi.org/10.1007/s11136-021-02846-w.

McClimans, L. (2021) “First-person epidemiological measures: Vehicles for patient-centered care”, Synthese. doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02094-z. Online First 2019.

McClimans, L., Pressgrove, G., and Campbell, E. (2019) “Objectives and Outcomes of Clinical Ethics Services: A Delphi Study”, Journal of Medical Ethics 45: 761-9.

McClimans, L, Browne, J and Stefan, C. (2017) “Clinical Outcome Measurement: Models, Theory, Psychometrics and Practice”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 65-66: 67-73.

McClimans, L. (2017) “Place of Birth: Evidence and Ethics”, Topoi, 36: 531-8.

Website

https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/philosophy/our_people/directory/mcclimans_leah.php

Biography

Catherine Kendig is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Exeter/ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society and her MSc in Philosophy and History of Science at King’s College London. Her main research interests are in philosophy of scientific classification (including normative aspects of classificatory and pre-classificatory activities), natural kinds, synthetic biology, and philosophy of race. Her research in socially engaged philosophy of synthetic biology and synthetic kinds has been supported through the National Science Foundation, Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences. As a recent Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, her research focused on scientific classification, the concept of homology and the liminality of biological kinds. She is editor of the recent collection of interdisciplinary essays Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice (2016, Routledge).

Selected Publications

• Kendig, Catherine and Bryan A. Bartley (2019). “Synthetic kinds: kind-making in synthetic biology.” In Julia R. S. Bursten (ed.) Perspectives on Classification in Synthetic Sciences: Unnatural Kinds. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 78-96. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315098838/chapters/10.4324/9781315098838-5
• Kendig, Catherine and John Grey (2019) “Can the epistemic value of natural kinds be explained independently of their metaphysics?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. axz004. https://academic.oup.com/bjps/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjps/axz004/5305024
• Kendig, Catherine (2018) “Considering the role marked variation plays in classifying humans: a normative approach.” Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 10(13): 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ptpbio.16039257.0010.013
• Kendig, Catherine and Eckdahl, Todd T. (2017) “Reengineering metaphysics: modularity, parthood, and evolvability in metabolic engineering”. Special issue: Ontologies of Living Beings (A.M. Ferner and Thomas Pradeu, eds.) Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9(8): 1-21. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ptb.6959004.0009.008
• Kendig, Catherine (2016) “Activities of kinding in scientific practice” In Catherine Kendig (ed.) Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1-13. https://www.routledge.com/products/9781848935402
• Kendig, Catherine (2016) “What is proof of concept research and how does it generate epistemic and ethical categories for future scientific practice?” Science and Engineering Ethics 22(3), 735-753. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-015-9654-0
• Kendig, Catherine (2011). “Race as a Physiosocial Phenomenon.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33(2): 191–222. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23335116

Websites

• MSU webpage: http://www.philosophy.msu.edu/people/faculty/catherinekendig/
• Academia.edu: https://michiganstate.academia.edu/CatherineKatieKendig
• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Catherine_Kendig

Bio

Sarah Wieten is an Assistant Professor in the Durham University Philosophy Department. Her background is in philosophy of science, especially medicine and social sciences, but she has also worked in clinical ethics and meta-research spaces.

Dr. Wieten’s research interests are philosophical and empirical. Her doctoral project was a study of epistemological and ethical issues in Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), a movement in medicine that emphasizes the use of randomized controlled trials. In addition to my philosophical research, she has worked on empirical projects as part of interdisciplinary teams. These projects also address her philosophical interest in the intersections between epistemology and ethics.

Website

https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/sarah-wieten/

Bio

Laura Cupples is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and a member of the affiliated faculty for the Department of Women and Gender Studies. She holds a BS in Physics from Davidson College, and an MA and PhD in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina. She previously held a postdoctoral research fellow position at Washington State University.

Interests

Dr. Cupples’ research interests include epistemology of disability, reproductive justice, critical metrology, and the intersection of science and values and health policy. She has recently taught courses in Bioethics, Philosophy of Science, and Contemporary Moral Problems.

Selected Publications

Colorafi, K., Cupples, L., Kallman, D. and Kennedy, J. 2021. “Disability stories: personal perspectives of people with disabilities on navigating the US health system.” Disability & Society, pp.1-23.

Cupples, Laura M. 2021. “Knowing with the Disability Community: Building a Disability Standpoint for Health Policy Research.” IJFAB: The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 14(2): 36-60.

Cupples, Laura M. 2020. “Disability, Epistemic Harms, and the Quality Adjusted Life Year.” IJFAB: The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.

Cupples, Laura M. 2019. “Measure Development and the Hermeneutic Task.” Synthese, pp. 1-16.

Cupples, Laura M. 2017. “The Epistemological Roles of Models in Health Science Measurement” In McClimans, Leah (Ed.). Measurement in Medicine: Essays in Assessment and Evaluation. London: Rowman and Littlefield International.

Website

https://lauracupples.com

Biography

Soohyun (Soo) Ahn is an Instructor at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT). She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Calgary, working in the philosophy of science under Dr. Marc Ereshefsky.

Her research is about how non-epistemic values (social, moral, and political values) affect scientific classifications. One of the questions she is currently working on is how epistemic and non-epistemic considerations should be balanced in classificatory projects.

Website

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soohyun-ahn/?originalSubdomain=ca

Biography

Deepanwita Dasgupta is a philosopher of science and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Dasgupta’s research areas include cognitive studies of science and scientific practice in its different peripheral and non-Western contexts (especially the contexts of the early 20th-century colonial India). She is interested in the emerging practices of the 21st-century science where scientific communities are routinely composed of many transnational groups, and might even include networks of collaboration with different traditions and cultures. Deepanwita thus sees science from a broad cognitive point of view, i.e., as something that emerges out of people and their many ideas and interactions. Focusing especially on the contexts of the early 20th-century India, and its pioneering physics community, Deepanwita has published a number of case studies where she has explored how such a modest group could bring in sets of new ideas in science, and in this way lay the foundation for a new professional community. She is thus interested in the problem of how contributory expertise in science could be born among self-trained scientists, who often work in the absence of a readymade community (or a readymade system of education).

She is also published a book in 2021 on the physics community of the early 20th-century India, and their many contributions to the 20th-century science, entitled Creativity from the Periphery: Trading Zones of Scientific Exchange in Colonial India, published by The University of Pittsburgh Press.

Deepanwita has taught various courses on scientific thought, science and society, and science and modern world at various institutions, such as the University of South Florida and the University of Texas at El Paso. She has been part of the Studies in Experience and Expertise (SEESHOP) group at Cardiff, UK, has presented numerous times at the History of Science Society Annual Meetings, and is currently collaborating with the Chemistry Department at UTEP to teach Science and Ethics courses in their MARC program. 

Selected Publications

“The Rocket Women of India: Eight women Scientists and Their Roles in the 2014 Mars Orbiter Mission,” MOM Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group (2021).

“Scientific Practice in the Contexts of Peripheral Science: C.V Raman and His Construction of a Mechanical Violin-Player.” Perspectives on Science 24 issue 4 (2016): 381-395.

“Stars, Peripheral Scientists, and Equations: The Case of M.N. Saha,” Physics in Perspective 17, issue 2 (2015): 83-106.

“Creating a Peripheral Trading Zone: Satyendra Nath Bose and Bose-Einstein Statistics, Doing Science in the Role of an Outsider.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26, no. 3 (2012): 259-287.

Website

Faculty Bio

Website

Marc Saner is a Professor at the University of Ottawa (Geography, Environmental Studies and Geomatics, cross-appointed at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and the Institute for Science, Society and Policy).  His interests are the science/policy interface, the governance of emerging technologies, and environmental ethics, risk and governance.

He recently built the new Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa and formerly held managing positions at the Council of Canadian Academies, Carleton University’s Regulatory Governance Initiative and Ethics and Policy Issues Centre as well as the independent Institute on Governance.

He holds a Ph.D. in applied ecology from the University of Basel, Switzerland (1991) as well as an M.A. in applied ethics from Carleton University, Canada (1999).  He remains an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University’s Philosophy Department where he is on the faculty of the new PhD Program on Public Ethics.

Website

Biography

Sophia Efstathiou is a Senior Researcher in Philosophy and Religious Studies at the program for Applied Ethics, NTNU. Her research interests include philosophy of race and medicine, the philosophy and practices of interdisciplinarity, and research into methods for “socially engaged” philosophy of science, such as action research, participatory-based approaches to philosophy and performance philosophy. Sophia has worked as part of science-humanities teams around issues such as modeling social and health care responses to population ageing, developing knowledge management tools for biology, biotechnological research into marine-based biopolymers and biofuel and developing “cultures of care” in animal-based research.

Though consistently interested in science, Sophia’s work has moved from pure science (Master of Physics, Joint Honours in Math and Physics, Warwick; 2000), to philosophy of medicine (PhD, Philosophy and Science Studies, UCSD; 2009) and to ethical, legal and social aspects of science since at NTNU. Efstathiou has been especially interested in how boundaries between science and non-science emerge and get enacted, how common language gets transformed into discipline-specific jargon and practices which she thinks of as found science, by analogy to found art. She has taught at the University of California San Diego (2007) and Southampton University (2009-11). She has contributed performances in the Athens Biennale (2013) and Performance Philosophy School of Athens (2014); worked in Tino Seghal’s This Progress (2014) and taught Philosophy on Our Feet (Plato Summer School). Her work has been published in Philosophy of Science, International Studies in Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biomedical and Biological Sciences, Hyle. Her research has been awarded Max Planck, Andrew White and NSF grants.

Selected Publications

• Sophia Efstathiou (2024), Meat we don’t greet: How ‘sausages’ can save pigs or how effacing livestock makes room for emancipation. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Sophia Efstathiou (2016), Genetics and Racial Minorities in the United States, in Naples N. (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Wiley-Blackwell.
• Giovanni De Grandis and Sophia Efstathiou (Eds.) (2016), Interdisciplinary Integration: The Real Grand Challenge for the Life Sciences? Special Section Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
• Sophia Efstathiou (2016), Is it possible to give scientific solutions to Grand Challenges? On the idea of grand challenges for life science research, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
• Sophia Efstathiou and Zara Mirmalek (2014), Interdisciplinarity In Action, in Cartwright N. and E. Montuschi (eds.), Understanding Society: Methods, Evidence and Measurement in the Social Sciences, Oxford University Press, 233-248.
• Rune Nydal, Sophia Efstathiou and Astrid Lægreid (2012), ‘Crossover Research: Exploring a collaborative mode of integration’, in van Lente H., C. Coenen, T. Fleischer, K. Konrad, L. Krabbenborg, C. Milburn, F. Thoreau, and T.B. Zülsdorf (eds.), Little by Little. Expansions of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies, IOS Press, 181-194
• Sophia Efstathiou (2012), How ordinary race concepts get to be usable in biomedical science: An account of founded race concepts, Philosophy of Science, 79: 701-713.

Performances

• October –November 2014 Interpreter in TIno Seghal’s artistic piece This Progress, in the Roman Agora in Athens. The situations were created by intercepting visitors who came to the Roman Agora ancient site in Athens and beginning a philosophical conversation with them choreographed on the archaeological site. Key topics I initiated discussion on were: what is the difference between knowledge and information, can one live many lives, the relation between eros and inquiry (erotisis) (works better in Greek!).
• October 2013 Athens Biennale. Invited performance ‘Ideobics’. The performance is based on combining ideas in holistic neurobiology with new age “positive thinking” to devise a set of bodily exercises that are aimed to accompany and reinforce positive ideas thus enhancing living in ideas, or ideobics as a counterpart to aerobics.

Website

https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/sophia.efstathiou

Bio

Jack Powers is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Western National Insurance in Minnesota. He earned his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. His philosophical research focuses on conceptual and ethical issues in biological and environmental science. His doctoral project investigated relationships between scientific descriptions and ethical and epistemic values. He uses research on the controversial herbicide, atrazine, as a case study.  His dissertation work was supported in part by the Tom Lapic Memorial Fellowship of Social Justice.

Selected Publications

Powers, J. (2016) The Inductive Risk of “Demasculinization.” In K. Elliot and T. Richards (eds.), Exploring Inductive Risk. Oxford University Press.

Powers, J. (2013). Finding Ernst Mayr’s Plato. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44(4), 714-723.

Website

LinkedIn

Bio

Website

https://www.isaacrecord.net/

Biography

Joan McGregor is a Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and Director of Lincoln Center of Applied Ethics at Arizona State University. She is adjunct professor with Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Senior Scholar with the School of Sustainability, and a Fellow at Institute for Humanities Research.  McGregor’s current research interests are focused on moral and legal questions in sustainability and in particular food systems and sustainability. She has collaborated with scientists and engineers, worked on the ethics of emerging technologies on among other issues, concerns to indigenous peoples and published widely in jurisprudence and bioethics. McGregor was co-director of two NEH summer institutes on sustainability on entitled “Fierce Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and the Foundations of Environmental Ethics” and  “Rethinking the Land Ethic: Humanities and Sustainability.”

Selected Publications

• “The Intersection of Environmental, Climate, and Food Justice”, invited chapter Food Justice, the Environment, and Climate Change eds. Erinn Cunniff Gilson and Sarah Kenehan  Rowman & Littlefield (2018).
• “Towards a Philosophical Understanding of TEK and Ecofeminism” in   Traditional Ecological Knowledge:  Learning from Indigenous Methods for Environmental Sustainability Edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling, Cambridge University Press (2018).
•  “Public Interests and the Duty of Food Citizenship” in Citizenship and Immigration editors Ann Cudd and Win-chiat Lee Springer Press (2016) 71-88.

Website

Faculty Bio

Biography

Mark Bourgeois is a philosopher affiliated with the IDEA Center, the Philosophy Department, and the Technology Ethics Center at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, Dr. Bourgeois was a postdoctoral fellow at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values at the University of Notre Dame, where his main role was to implement the Social Responsibilities of Researchers training program, an NSF EESE award aiming to train STEM PhD students from all fields in ethics and social engagement.

Dr. Bourgeois completed his PhD in Philosophy in 2014 at Loyola University Chicago, with a dissertation analyzing the concept of natural function in biology as compared to engineered function in artifacts. Earlier he had earned a Master’s in philosophy from Miami of Ohio, as well as a BA in philosophy and a BS in physics from the University of Illinois. Before undertaking the PhD, he spent several years as an engineer in the telecom industry, most of them with Lucent Technologies, working on the optical backbone networks that comprise the trunk lines of the Internet. While earning his PhD, he taught engineering design and engineering ethics in the Biomedical Engineering department at Northwestern University.

His areas of expertise include philosophy of biology; metaphysics; ethics education; engineering ethics; research ethics; clinical ethics; engineering design; and some regulatory policy.

His main interest is in teaching ethics to technical students, especially big-picture social and ethical issues like climate change and emerging technologies, and in general how social issues and social context do – or should – relate to how scientists and engineers go about their work. As a former engineering and science undergraduate, he believes they do not get enough opportunity in their education to think about the impact of their work on society, and so they often conclude that such issues are not their concern – a blind spot that is only rarely corrected in graduate school, and more often made worse.

He is also developing a strong interest in the role of motivated reasoning in public understanding of science as it relates to policy, and how science might be communicated to the public in ways that enable rather than circumvent productive policy debates.

Education

• Ph.D., Loyola University Chicago, Philosophy, 2014
• M.A., Miami University (Ohio), Philosophy, 1999
• B.S., University of Illinois, Physics, 1996
• B.A., University of Illinois, Philosophy, 1996

Selected Publications

• “Autonomy and Exploitation in Clinical Research: What the Proposed Surfaxin Trial Can Teach Us about Consent,” Ethics in Biology Engineering & Medicine, 2012 v3., 10 pp. (2013)
• “Ethics in Engineering Design” in Engineering Design and Communication, Principles and Practice, Northwestern University (2011)
• “Ethics in a Design Paradigm,” from Frontiers in Education 37th Annual Conference, October 10-13, 2007, Work in Progress: Ethics in a Design Paradigm, 2 pp. (2007)

Websites

LinkedIn

Biography

Syd Johnson is a philosopher/bioethicist/neuroethicist, a Clinical Ethics Consultant, and Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at Upstate Medical University. She was formerly an Assistant Professor at Michigan Technological University, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Humanities, and Kinesiology & Integrative Physiology.

Dr. Johnson’s research is empirically-oriented and multidisciplinary. The two main foci of her work are Disorders of Consciousness, and sport-related neurotrauma. In her research on Disorders of Consciousness, Syd’s aim is to problematize current approaches to quality of life assessment, as well as research and treatment priorities in Disorders of Consciousness. This work has implications for several core problems in bioethics, including ethics at the end-of-life, the justification of research on vulnerable populations, and surrogate decision making. This work has potentially broad application to other vulnerable groups, including persons with dementia, infants, children, individuals with profound cognitive disabilities, and non-human animals. Her second area of research explores the ethical dimensions of neurotrauma resulting from sport-related concussion, in both youth and adult athletes. Sport-related concussion has been a subject of intense public and media interest in recent years, but it has been largely neglected as a topic of bioethical and neuroethical concern. This area of research is one where Syd has frequent occasion to interact with the media and the public, which accords well with her pedagogical mission to enhance bioethical literacy. She serves as a specialist reviewer of scientific research proposals related to concussion, mild traumatic brain injury, and PTSD for the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Defense.

At Michigan Tech, Syd is working to promote the integration of research ethics into science education, using the National Science Foundation mandate concerning Responsible Conduct of Research education as a platform to engage student-scientists as they develop tools for thinking about their work within a moral framework.

Selected publications

2024. Johnson, LSM, Fenton, A., Jensvold, M. The Three Pillars of Ethical Research with Nonhuman Primates: A Work Developed in Collaboration with the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Cambridge Elements Series. Cambridge University Press. (in press)

2024. Johnson, LSM. Philosophical, Medical, and Legal Controversies About Brain Death.Cambridge Elements Series. Cambridge University Press. (in press)

2015. Johnson, LSM. Sport-related neurotrauma and neuroprotection: Are Return-to-play protocols justified by paternalism? Neuroethics 8(1):15-26. (online June 2014)

2013. Johnson, LSM. Can they suffer? The ethical priority of quality of life research in disorders of consciousness. Bioethica Forum 6(4):129-136

2011. Johnson, LSM. The right to die in the minimally conscious state. Journal of Medical Ethics 37:175-178

Website

https://www.upstate.edu/bioethics/faculty-staff/fac_johnson.php

www.sydmjohnson.com

Bio

Vitaly Pronskikh is a physicist and a philosopher of science. He holds a PhD in Physics (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna) and has been a PhD Candidate in Philosophy of Science at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (his area of specialization was philosophy of scientific experimentation). Until 2010 he had worked as a Senior Scientist at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia. Since then, he has been a Research Associate (postdoc), and an Application Physicist of Modeling/Energy Deposition/Theory Department (Accelerator Physics Center) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, USA.

In physics, his research is centered on particle physics (rare decays), computer modeling and simulations for the instrumentation design, nuclear physics, and nuclear energy. He has published ~100 papers in those fields in cooperation with other scientists and international collaborations. Many people he met and learned from since his graduate studies, e.g. senior colleagues or University professors, were philosophically-minded scientists or scientists contributing to philosophy. Therefore, also in his view, science and philosophy should converge for a thoughtful practitioner of either field.

In philosophy, he focuses on philosophy of scientific experimentation in a broad sense: epistemology of modeling and simulations (e.g. verification and validation problem), history and philosophy of large research projects in big science and megascience, epistemology of large collaborations (e.g. epistemic stratification, unity, and epistemic justice), types of theory ladenness and exploratory experimentation, roles of experimental background.

He is a member of Philosophy of Science Association and American Physical Society. At Fermilab, Vitaly is a member of Fermi Society of Philosophy.

Selected Publications

• Interlacing of theory, experiment and instrument in accelerator-based experiments: the “theoretical-operational” model, Investigated in Russia, 2009, http://zhurnal.ape.relarn.ru/articles/2009/044e.pdf (with A.I. Lipkin)
• How to Model the World?, Metascience, November 2014,Volume 23, Issue 3, pp 597-601 (a review of M. Weisberg’s Simulation and Similarity).
• Epistemic Disunity of Experimentation in Megascience and Approaches to its Surmounting, Epistemology & Philosophy of Science, 2015 (forthcoming, in Russian).
• Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation, In: Philosophy of Science/ Handbook for Graduate Schools/ ed. A.I.Lipkin, Urait , 2015, p.512. (with A.I. Lipkin, in Russian).

Website

Google Scholar

Biography

Hanne Andersen is Professor in the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen. As a historian and philosopher of science situated within a Faculty of Science, she is deeply engaged in making history, philosophy and sociology of science relevant to researchers and educators as well as to academic leaders and policy makers. Her research interests include philosophy of interdisciplinarity, accountability and quality control in contemporary research, responsible conduct of research, science and values, scientific change, and the nature of science and science education. She has previously worked at the medical school at the University of Copenhagen and still has a strong interest in topics such as history and philosophy of epidemiology, the concepts of disease, and causality and probability in the health sciences.

Dr. Andersen teaches philosophy of science to science students and responsible conduct of science to junior researchers from the sciences.

As an ‘engaged’ philosopher of science, Hanne is engaged in local and national initiatives to develop guidelines for good scientific practice that can be recognized as relevant and important by practicing scientists, and neither as abstract rules that do not relate to actual practices nor as over-detailed prescriptions that are seen as missing the point. She is also engaged in developing curricula for training in responsible conduct of science from the bachelor to the PhD level – and beyond!

Another strong interest is analyses of the development of contemporary science and the development of a philosophy of interdisciplinarity that can inform administrators and policy makers and help resolving some of the ‘interdisciplinary paradoxes’ and ‘tensions’.

Representative publications

• Andersen, H. (2022): Scientific progress and interdisciplinarity, in Y. Shan (ed.): New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress. Taylor & Francis, new York, s. 374-391.
• Andersen, H. (2021): Philosophy of scientific malpractice, SATS – Nothern European Journal for Philosophy.
• Andersen, H. (2016): Collaboration, Interdisciplinarity and the Epistemology of Contemporary Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science A 56(1):1-12
• Andersen, H. (2014): Co-Author Responsibility, EMBO reports , 15: 914-918
• Andersen, H. (2014): Epistemic dependence in contemporary science: Practices and malpractices, in L. Soler (ed.): Science after the practice turn, Routledge, pp. 161-173.
• Andersen, H. & S. Wagenknecht (2012): Epistemic dependence in interdisciplinary research, in Synthese 190(11): 1881-1890.
• Andersen, H. (2012): The Second Essential Tension: On Tradition and Innovation in Interdisciplinary Research, in Topoi 32(1): 3-8.
• Andersen, H. (2011): Conceptual development in interdisciplinary research, in Feest & Steinle (eds): Scientific Concepts and Investigative Practices, Kluwer, pp. 271-292.
• Folker, A.P., H. Andersen & P. Sandøe (2008): Implicit normativity in scientific advice – values in nutrition scientists’ decisions to give public advice, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 54: 199-206.

Website

https://www.ind.ku.dk/english/staff-auto-list/?pure=en/persons/52310http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/hanne.andersen@css.au.dk

Bio

C. Tyler DesRoches is Associate Professor of Sustainability and Human Well-Being at the School of Sustainability and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is also the President-Elect of International Network for Economic Method and a Project Director, Philosophy of Economics, at the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty. Tyler has a PhD in philosophy from the University of British Columbia and his areas of specialization include the history and philosophy of economics, human well-being and sustainability.

Selected Publications

Bethem, J., G. Frigo, S. Biswas, C. T. DesRoches and M. J. Pasqualetti. 2020. Energy decisions within an applied ethics framework: An analysis of five recent controversies. Energy, Sustainability and Society 10: Art. 29.

DesRoches, C. T. 2020. The preservation paradox and natural capital. Ecosystem Services 41:101058.

DesRoches, C. T. 2020. Value commitment, resolute choice, and the normative foundations of behavioural welfare economics. Journal of Applied Philosophy 37(4):562-577.

Inkpen, S. A. and C. T. DesRoches. 2020. When ecology needs economics and economics needs ecology: Interdisciplinary exchange during the Anthropocene. Ethics, Policy & Environment 23(2):203-221.

Nagatsu, M., T. Davis, C. T. DesRoches, I. Koskinen, M. MacLeod, M. Stjanovic and H. Thoren. 2020. Philosophy of science for sustainability science. Sustainability Science 15:1807-1817.

Pike, K. R. and C. T. DesRoches. 2020. Virtual consumption, sustainability and human well-being. Environmental Values 29(3):361-378.

Website:

https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/person/c-tyler-desroches/

Bio:

Adam Briggle is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas. His teaching and research interests are at the intersections of science, technology, ethics, and politics. He has published in many fields, including science policy, bioethics, environmental policy, philosophy of technology, and new media ethics. Prior to coming to UNT, he served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. His PhD is in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Briggle’s research is on the topic of fracking and takes the form of “field philosophy,” an approach to engaged scholarship that works directly with stakeholders struggling with real-world problems. Briggle has served as advisor and advocate for the City of Denton with regard to its policies for shale gas development. He has also published on this topic in several venues, including The Denton Record Chronicle, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Science Progress, Truthout, Slate, and The Guardian. He is currently working on a book on field philosophy and fracking for Liveright Press, a division of W.W. Norton.

Selected publications:

Briggle, A. (2024) A Field Guide to Climate Change: Understanding the Problems, Broadview Press.

Frodeman, R. and A. Briggle. (2016) Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st Century Philosophy, Rowman and Littlefield.

Briggle, A. (2015) A Field Philosopher’s Guide to Fracking: How One Texas Town Stood Up to Big Oil and Gas, Liveright.

Briggle, A. and C. Mitcham. (2012) Ethics and Science: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press.

Brey, P., A. Briggle, and E. Spence. (2012) The Good Life in a Technological Age, Routledge.

Briggle, A. (2012) “It’s Time to Frack the Innovation System,” Slate and reprinted in the Dallas Morning News.

Briggle, A. (2010) A Rich Bioethics: Public Policy, Biotechnology, and the Kass Council, University of Notre Dame Press.

Websites:

https://philosophy.unt.edu/people/faculty/adam-briggle
https://adambriggle.com

Bio

Justin Biddle is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the director of the Ethics, Technology, and Human Interaction Center, and a Faculty Affiliate in the Georgia Tech Center for Machine Learning. He is also a part of the Georgia Artificial Intelligence Manufacturing Technology Corridor (GA-AIM) and lead a team to facilitate the early identification and management of potential ethical and societal consequences of AI-enabled manufacturing systems. I am also co-lead of the Ethical AI Thrust of the National AI Institute on Advances in Optimization.

Dr. Biddle’s research interests are interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on fields such as philosophy of science, bioethics, environmental ethics, philosophy of food, the ethics of emerging technologies, and science and technology policy. The two main foci of his research are the role of values in science and the epistemic and ethical implications of the social organization of research. A particular focus is the epistemic and ethical implications of current intellectual property and licensing policies in science, especially in biomedicine and agricultural biotechnology.He has been a Distinguished Fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, working on the epistemic and ethical implications of patenting and licensing in genetically modified (GM) seeds, and a Fellow in Philosophy of Science at Bielefeld University, Germany.

Justin holds a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Dayton and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Notre Dame. Before joining the School of Public Policy, he taught in the Department of Philosophy at Bielefeld University, Germany.

Selected Publications

Biddle, J. (2023). “Values in AI Systems.” In G. Robson & J. Tsou (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Technology Ethics. London: Routledge, 132-140.

Biddle, J. (2022). “On Predicting Recidivism: Epistemic Risk, Tradeoffs, and Values in Machine Learning.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52(3): 321-341.

Schiff, D., K. Laas, J. Biddle, and J. Borenstein (2022). “Global AI Ethics Documents: What They Reveal About Motivations, Practices, and Policies.” In K. Laas, M. Davis, & E. Hildt (Eds.), Codes of Ethics and Ethical Guidelines: Emerging Technologies, Changing Fields. Springer: 121-143.

Biddle, J. (2020). “Epistemic Risks in Cancer Screening: Implications for Ethics and Policy.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 79: 101200.

Biddle, J. (2018). “‘Antiscience Zealotry’? Values, Epistemic Risk, and the GMO Debate.” Philosophy of Science 85: 360-379.

Biddle, J. (2016). “Intellectual Property in the Biomedical Sciences.” In Routledge Companion to Bioethics, R. Kukla, J. Arras, and E. Fenton, eds. London: Routledge.

Biddle, J. (2014). “Can Patents Prohibit Research? On the Social Epistemology of Patenting and Licensing in Science.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 45: 14-23.

Biddle, J. (2013). “Institutionalizing Dissent: A Proposal for an Adversarial System of Pharmaceutical Research.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 23: 325-353.

Biddle, J. (2013). “State of the Field: Transient Underdetermination and Values in Science.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44: 124-133.

Biddle, J. (2012). “Tragedy of the Anticommons? Intellectual Property and the Sharing of Scientific Information.” Philosophy of Science 79: 821-832.

Biddle, J. (2011). “Putting Pragmatism to Work in the Cold War: Science, Technology, and Politics in the Writings of James B. Conant.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42: 552-561.

Biddle, J. and E. Winsberg (2010). “Value Judgements and the Estimation of Uncertainty in Climate Modeling.” In New Waves in Philosophy of Science, P. D. Magnus and J. Busch, eds. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 172-197.

Biddle, J. (2009). “Advocates or Unencumbered Selves? On the Role of Mill’s Political Liberalism in Longino’s Contextual Empiricism.” Philosophy of Science 76: 612-623.

Biddle, J. (2007). “Lessons from the Vioxx Debacle: What the Privatization of Science Can Teach Us about Social Epistemology.” Social Epistemology 21: 21-39.

Websites

http://www.justinbiddle.com/

Bio

Jackie Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, and an associate member of the Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) at the University of Western Ontario (Western). She works primarily in the areas of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of psychiatry and empirically informed philosophy of mind. She has published on a variety of topics including: unity of the mind-brain sciences, the epistemology of experimentation and mental disorders. She is co-editor with Harold Kincaid of an edited volume in philosophy of psychiatry entitled Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds (MIT Press 2014).

Jackie’s desire to be an “engaged” philosopher prompted her to obtain a M.S. degree in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and Graduate Student Trainee Certificate at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint interdisciplinary collaboration between Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University. While at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (2007-2012) she held a secondary appointment in the Department of Neurobiology and was actively involved in mentoring undergraduate majors enrolled in the Neuroscience and Science and Technology Honors Programs.

At Western, she is actively engaged in building interdisciplinary collaborations between the Rotman Institute of Philosophy (whose slogan is “Engaging Science”) and the Brain and Mind Institute (BMI). She is a co-creator of the Lab Associates Program, which trains and places Ph.D. and M.A. students in philosophy into cognitive neuroscience laboratories, where they have the opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of neuroscientific research and play an active role in the life of the laboratory.

Selected Publications

(2021) “New Frontiers in Translational Research: Touchscreens, Open Science, and The Mouse Translational Research Accelerator Platform (MouseTRAP),” with Julie R. Dumont, Sara Memar, Miguel Skirzewski, Jinxia Wan, Maryam H. Mofrad, Hassam Zafar Ansari, Yulong Li, Lyle Muller, Vania F. Prado, Marco A.M. Prado, Lisa M. Saksida, Timothy J. Bussey. Genes, Brain and Behavior.

(2020) “Understanding Crime: A Mutilevel Approach” (with D. Ward). In Psychology, Crime & Law, 25(6): 709-711.

(2019) “Achieving Cumulative Progress in Understanding Crime: Some Insights from the Philosophy of Science”. In Psychology, Crime & Law, 25(6): 561-576.

(2016) “Stabilizing constructs through collaboration across different research fields as a way to foster the integrative approach of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Project”. In Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

(2014) “Is the Next Frontier in Neuroscience a Decade of the Mind?” In Brain Theory: Critical Essays in Neurophilosophy, Charles Wolfe, Ed.(Palgrave-MacMillan), pp. 45-67.

(2014) “Stabilizing Mental Disorders: Prospects and Problems” in Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds, Harold Kincaid and Jacqueline A. Sullivan, Eds. (MIT Press), pp. 257-281.

(2010) “A Role for Representation in Cognitive Neurobiology”, Philosophy of Science 77(5): 875-887.

(2009) “The Multiplicity of Experimental Protocols: A Challenge to Reductionist and Non-Reductionist Models of the Unity of Neuroscience”, Synthese 167:511-539.

(2008) “Memory Consolidation, Multiple Realization and Modest Reductions”, Philosophy of Science 75(5): 501-513.

Websites

https://www.uwo.ca/philosophy/people/sullivan.html

http://jacquelineannesullivan.wordpress.com

Bio

Matthew J. Brown works in the fields of philosophy of science, science and technology studies, history of philosophy, and cognitive science. He is Professor of Philosophy and the Jo Ann & Donald N. Boydston Chair of American Philosophy at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) and the Director of the Center for Dewey Studies, which focuses both on the study of John Dewey’s life and works as well as carrying on the living legacy of John Dewey.

The main focus of Brown’s current research is on the interactions of science and values, broadly construed. He has developed a general account of scientific practice and its interaction with judgments of value in his book Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science. He is currently working to trace the consequences of such accounts for the role of science in democratic politics and policymaking.

Dr. Brown also works on the history of philosophy of science, especially on figures who focused on the relationship between science, values, and society. He has particularly focused on John Dewey and Paul Feyerabend.

Brown engages in collaborative, multi-disciplinary research projects on engineering ethics and engineering education, bringing his expertise in science and values as well as his expertise in sociocultural theories and methods in cognitive science to the project. This research has led to two NSF-grant funded projects, “Engineering Ethics as an Expert Guided and Socially Situated Activity” (2013-2017) and “The Formation of Engineers in the Research Lab: A Cognitive Ethnographic Study” (2019-2023).

Through his previous position as Director of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology, Dr. Brown organized conferences and workshops, hosted an annual series of lectures aimed at students and the local community, and hosted video lectures and other resources on the Center website.

Brown received a B.S. from the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he studied with Jon J. Johnston, David Finkelstein, Bryan Norton, and Nancy Nersessian. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, where his dissertation was supervised by Nancy Cartwright and Paul Churchland (co-chairs), Gerald Doppelt, Donald Rutherford, Roddey Reid, and Michael Cole.

Selected Publications

• (with Jacob Stegenga) “The Validity of the Argument from Inductive Risk (Discussion Note),” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2023.
• (with Magdalena Grohman and Eun Ah Lee) “Ethical Reflection as a Part of Creative Problem-Solving” in Jonathan A. Plucker (ed.), Creativity & Innovation: Theory, Research, and Practice 2nd edition, 2022.
• Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science (2020) University of Pittsburgh Press.
• (with Eun Ah Lee). “Connecting Inquiry and Values in Science Education: An Approach based on John Dewey’s Philosophy.” Science & Education 27(1-2):63–79, 2018.
• “Values in Science beyond Undetermination and Inductive Risk,” (2013) Philosophy of Science 80(5): 829-839.
• “The Democratic Control of the Scientific Control of Politics” (2013) in Dennis Dieks and Vassilios Karakostas, editors, EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science. (Selected proceedings from the European Philosophy of Science Association 2011.), pp. 479-92.
• “The Source and Status of Values for Socially Responsible Science” Philosophical Studies, Volume 163, Issue 1, March 2013, pp 67-76.
• “Science, Values, and Democracy in the Global Climate Change Debate,” (2013) in Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations: Essays for a Bold New World, ed. by Shane J. Ralston.
• “John Dewey’s Logic of Science” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2(2), Fall 2012, pp. 258-306.
• “Science as Socially Distributed Cognition: Bridging Philosophy and Sociology of Science” (2011) Foundations of the Formal Sciences VII: Bringing together Philosophy and Sociology of Science, v. 32 of Studies in Logic, pp. 17-30.

Websites

http://matthewjbrown.net/
http://deweycenter.siu.edu

Bio

Nicolae Morar is an Associate Professor, Environmental Studies and Philosophy, at the University of Oregon. His research interests lie at the intersection of biology, ecology, and bioethics (especially biomedical, genethics, environmental, and research ethics). His work looks at how various conceptual analyses in philosophy of biology and ecology influence and transforms debates in bioethics, and in ethics broadly construed. His collaborative research has provided a critical assessment of the normative role of biodiversity in environmental ethics debates. Morar has several on-going projects concerning the role of biology and genetics in applied ethics, as well as the role emotions (especially, disgust) play in normative debates in our society. He is particularly interested in how new microbiological conceptions of human organisms and current biotechnologies are altering traditional conceptions of human nature.

Dr. Morar received his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in France and has earned his PhD in philosophy from Purdue University. His dissertation analyzes the ways in which current biotechnologies alter traditional conceptions of human nature.

In his current work, Dr. Morar approaches the notion of human nature from various perspectives: at the limit between non-human animal and humans, where he proposes a more radical solution to the moral conundrum raised by genetic chimeras; at the limit between humans and more than humans, where he claims that the argument from human nature fails to characterize genetic altering techniques as morally reprehensible. He also proposes a positive account of human nature from a biological perspective where he employs the notion of norm of reaction along with a microbial view of human organisms to capture the variability at heart in every human population.

He is a Co-PI on the grant Biodiversity at Twenty-Five: The Problem of Ecological Proxy Values, which provides a critical assessment of the normative role of biodiversity. He is also a Co-PI on the grant Between Deleuze and Foucault, which will make available a first complete transcription and translation of Deleuze’s 1985-1986 seminar on Foucault, as well as an edited collection as a critical apparatus.

In September 2012, he was a Visiting Scholar at The Hastings Center working on a project entitled “A Critical Argument for a Principle of Minimal Biological Realism in Bioethics”. He joined the Rock Ethics Institute at The Pennsylvania State University in the Fall 2013, as a Post Doctoral Scholar, working on research ethics projects and on implementing ethics in science education at the graduate level. In the fall of 2015, he joined the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Philosophy as a regular faculty. As an Associate Member, he continues his sustained collaborations with the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at University of Oregon.

Research Interests

Applied Ethics, Philosophy of Biology/ Ecology, Recent French Philosophy (especially, Michel Foucault)

Selected Publications

• “Enhancement, Authenticity, and Social Acceptance in the Age of Individualism” (with Dan Kelly), American Journal of Bioethics – Neuroscience, forthcoming.
• (2018) “Bioethics and the Hypothesis of Extended Health” (with Joshua A. Skorburg), Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 28:3, p.341-376.
• (2016) “Bioethics and the Constitution of the Ecological Individual” (with Jonathan Beever), Environmental Philosophy.
• (2016) “Toward an Ecological Bioethics”, (with Joshua A. Skorburg), American Journal of Bioethics, 16(5), p.35-37
• (2016) “Implicit Bias and Gifts: How does Social Psychology Help us Thinking Differently about the Medical Practice?” (with Natalia Washington), Hastings Center Report, 46(3), p.33-43
• (2016) “The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine” (with Jonathan Beever), American Journal of Bioethics, 16(2), p.34-45
• (2015) “Biodiversity at Twenty-Five Years: Revolution or Red Herring?”, (with Ted Toadvine & Brendan Bohannan), Ethics, Policy, & Environment, 18(1), pp.16-26
• (2015) “An Empirically Informed Critique of Habermas’ Argument from Human Nature”, Journal of Science & Engineering Ethics, 21(1), pp.95-113
• (2014) “Against the Yuck Factor: On the Ideal Role of Disgust in Society” (with Daniel Kelly), Utilitas.

Website

www.uoregon.edu/~nmorar

Biography

Jonathan Beever earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy from Purdue University where he later stayed as a National Science Foundation funded postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering ethics. After completing another postdoctoral appointment at Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute, Dr. Beever became an Assistant Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture and was appointed to the Philosophy andTexts and Technology PhD program at the University of Central Florida.

In 2019, Dr. Beever took on an additional role at the university as a Founding Director of the UCF Center for Ethics. Here, the aim is to cultivate an institutional culture of ethical literacy with a unified and ongoing conversation about ethics and a habit of practical application to research, teaching, and partnerships. The role has afforded him the privilege to work with students in a variety of different ways, such as the Ethics Ambassadors Network. The Network allows student volunteers to help organize events, collaborate in research projects, and lead workshops and trainings.

Dr. Beever’s research in applied ethics is important because its goal is to help the community reimagine their relationships to and in the natural world. One problem at the forefront of his work is the rate and scope of anthropogenic climate change. “Despite all the science and data about how dangerous anthropogenic climate change is and will continue to be, and the horrible effects it has on life around is, nothing much is changing,” he says. This focus on ecological ethics is all in the service of helping others think in new ways about our network of relationships, how we relate to each other and other life on the planet, and how thinking about values is influenced by our relationships.

Beever has published on a wide range of interrelated topics including ethics and biotechnologies, ethics pedagogy, biosemiotics, environmental ethics, and postmodern environmental politics. He has held fellowships with the Kaufmann Foundation in entrepreneurship, the Aldo Leopold Foundation in conservation ethics, and the Global Sustainable Soundscape Network in soundscape ethics, among others.

Websites

jonathan.beever.org
https://psu-us.academia.edu/JonathanBeever

Bio

Dr. Michael D. Burroughs is Director of the Kegley Institute of Ethics and Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Bakersfield. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Memphis and, before moving to CSU Bakersfield, held an academic and leadership appointment at UNC Chapel Hill Parr Center for Ethics and served as Assistant Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Penn State University.

Dr. Burroughs’s research interests include philosophy of education (with a focus on experiential, moral, and the intersection of science and ethics education), philosophy of childhood, and ethics. He has published on implementing philosophy in pre-college education and engaging children as philosophers, with forthcoming papers on topics in the history of ethics and political philosophy. Dr. Burroughs is also co-authoring a comprehensive philosophy for children textbook that can be used by K-12 teachers to introduce philosophy to their students.

In addition to his theoretical interests, Dr. Burroughs has worked extensively in philosophy outreach. Prior to joining the Rock Ethics Institute, he developed philosophy programs at high schools in Salisbury, MD and Belize, Central America. He also led philosophy discussion groups for two years at Eastern Correctional Institution in Princess Anne, MD.

As a graduate student at the University of Memphis, Dr. Burroughs co-founded ‘Philosophical Horizons’, a community outreach program dedicated to introducing the history and practice of philosophy to children in Memphis City Schools, grades K-12. Dr.Burroughs also served as Outreach Coordinator for the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Outreach).

Selected Publications

Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (co-authored with Dr. Jana Mohr Lone). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. 

“Dialogue and Ethics in the Classroom,” Teaching Ethics: Instructional Models, Methods, and Modalities for University Studies, ed. Daniel W. Wueste (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 25-38.

“Supporting Public Philosophy: Two Lives and Three Strategies,” Public Philosophy Journal 3, no. 2 (2020).

“Navigating the Penumbra: Children and Moral Responsibility,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 1 (March 2020): 77-101.

“How to Survive a Crisis: Reclaiming Philosophy as a Public Practice,” Palgrave Communications 4, (Fall 2018): online.

“Learning to Listen: Epistemic Injustice and the Child” (co-authored with Dr. Deborah Tollefsen), Episteme: Journal of Individual and Social Epistemology 13, no. 3 (September 2016): 359-377.

“Practicing Philosophy: Philosophy with Children and Experiential Learning,” Experiential Learning in  Philosophy, eds. Julinna Oxley and Ramona Ilea (New York: Routledge Press, 2015), 21-36.

“Reconsidering the Examined Life: Philosophy and Children,” Negotiating Childhoods, eds. Lucy Hopkins, Mark MacLeod, and Wendy C. Turgeon (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), 191-200.

Website

https://www.michaeldeanburroughs.com/

Bio

Bryan Cwik is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and University Studies at Portland State University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Virginia and went on to work as a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State University’s Rock Ethics Institute.

Bryan’s primary research focuses on issues at the intersection of practical ethics (esp. bioethics and business ethics), philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy. He is also interested in environmental philosophy.

His research project at Penn State examined ethical issues raised by interactions between the community of scientific researchers and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, with a special focus on the role of intellectual property in structuring those relations. He is also very interested in more general questions in political philosophy about topics like global justice, international trade, property and the nature of ownership, and intergenerational justice; in ethical theory and moral psychology about the nature of moral judgment; and in the history of early modern philosophy, esp. the moral and political philosophies of Hobbes, Hume, and Adam Smith.

Website

https://www.pdx.edu/philosophy/profile/bryan-cwik

Bio

Heather Douglas is a Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on the interface between science and policy, with particular attention to the role of values in science, the relationship between citizens and experts in democracies, and the norms that should govern the weighing of complex sets of evidence for use in policy-making.

She has served on the Governing Board of the Philosophy of Science Association, the steering committee of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, and the Section L committee for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan State University, she was the Waterloo Chair in Science and Society in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; the Phibbs Assistant Professor of Science and Ethics at the University of Puget Sound (1998-2004); Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee (2004-2011); and Visiting Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2011).

Heather received her Ph.D. from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, and earned her B.A. in Philosophy and Physics at the University of Delaware in 1991. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation; she was recently a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Selected Publications

The Rightful Place of Science: Science, Values, and Democracy, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, Arizona State University, 2021. (Open Access version)

“Weighing Complex Evidence in a Democratic Society” (2012), Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, vol. 22, pp. 139-162.

“The Dark Side of Science,” The Scientist, November 16, 2011, http://the-scientist.com/2011/11/16/opinion-the-dark-side-of-science/.  Reprinted in The Norton Field Guide to Writing, 3^rd Edition, Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Fracnine Weinberg (eds.), W.W. Norton Company, 2013.

“Engagement for Progress: Applied Philosophy of Science in Context,” Synthese, vol. 177, pp. 317-335, 2010.

Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Website

Faculty Bio

Bio

Dr. Kathryn (Katie) Plaisance is a Professor in the Department of Knowledge Integration, with cross-appointments to Philosophy and Psychology, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She has several interconnected research programs in philosophy of science, social epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. Her work aims to improve our understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, foster fruitful interactions between philosophy and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), and help make scientific research and its applications more epistemically and ethically sound.

Dr. Plaisance has several areas of research, including: (1) Socially and scientifically engaged philosophy of science, through which she uses a combination of philosophical and empirical research methods to study engagement between philosophy and other fields. (2) Interactional expertise – a concept that captures the ability to speak the language of a discipline without the corresponding ability to practice. (3) Philosophy of the human behavioral sciences, where she examines concepts, methods, and inferences in human behavioral genetics. Katie’s most recent work seeks to bring these research projects together by considering how philosophers can best acquire and make use of interactional expertise in order to improve the practices and products of science.

Katie completed a BSc in molecular biology and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000 and, after taking time off to travel, went on to the University of Minnesota where she obtained an MA and PhD in philosophy, specializing in philosophy of science, in 2006. After receiving her PhD, she spent two and a half years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Ethics and Science in Hannover, Germany, before moving to Waterloo for her current position.

Katie is a co-founder and co-director of the International Network of Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and Engineering (SRPoiSE).

Selected Publications

Plaisance, Kathryn S. and Kevin C. Elliott (2021), “A Framework for Broadly Engaged Philosophy of Science,” Philosophy of Science vol 88 (4): 594-615. [Preprint]

Plaisance, Kathryn S., Jay Michaud, and John McLevey (2021), “Pathways of Influence: Understanding the Impact of Philosophy of Science in Scientific Domains,” Synthese, 199: 4865-4896.

Plaisance, Kathryn S. (2020), “The Benefits of Acquiring Interactional Expertise: Why (Some) Philosophers of Science Should Engage Scientific Communities,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 83: 53-62.

Plaisance, Kathryn S., Alexander V. Graham, John McLevey, and Jay Michaud (2019), “Show Me the Numbers: A Quantitative Portrait of the Attitudes, Experiences, and Values of Philosophers of Science Regarding Broadly Engaged Work,” Synthese, 198: 4603-4633.

McLevey, John, Alexander V. Graham, Reid McIlroy-Young, Pierson Brown, and Kathryn S. Plaisance (2018), “Interdisciplinarity and Insularity in the Diffusion of Knowledge: An Analysis of Disciplinary Boundaries Between Philosophy of Science and The Sciences,” Scientometrics, 117: 331-349.

Plaisance, Kathryn S., and Eric B. Kennedy (2014), “A Pluralistic Approach to Interactional Expertise”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 47: 60-68.

Fehr, Carla and Kathryn S. Plaisance (2010), “Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science: An Introduction”, Synthese, vol. 177(3): 301-316.

Websites

https://uwaterloo.ca/knowledge-integration/about-department-knowledge-integration/our-researchers/kathryn-plaisance

https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/kplaisan

Biography:

Thomas M. Powers is the founding director of the Center for Science, Ethics, and Public Policy (SEPP) at the University of Delaware.  He is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the School of Public Policy, and a faculty research fellow of the Delaware Biotechnology Institute.  His research concerns ethics and emerging technologies, environmental ethics, and the responsible conduct of scientific research.

Dr. Powers has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on several federal and state grants.  These grants include NSF-RAISE, an educational program in research ethics for science and engineering graduate students, which is ongoing at UD.

Powers received a Ph.D. in philosophy (University of Texas at Austin), and an undergraduate degree in philosophy (College of William and Mary).  He has been a DAAD-Fulbright dissertation-year fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia.

Selected Publications

Powers, TM (forthcoming). Ethics for Robots, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Digital Ethics, eds. L Floridi and M Taddeo, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, West Sussex, UK.

Powers, TM, and Ganascia, JG, (2020). The Ethics of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, in Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI, eds. M Dubber, F Pasquale, and S Das, Oxford University Press.

Tolmeijer, S, A Weiss, M Hanheide, F Lindner, TM Powers, C Dixon, and M Tielman (2020).  Taxonomy of Trust-Relevant Failures and Mitigation Strategies, in Proceedings of Human Robot Interaction 2020 (HRI ’20), ACM, New York, NY, USA.

Powers, TM and Shah, SI (2017). Technological Ethics in Context: The Case of Nanotechnology, in Philosophy: Technology, ed. AF Beavers, Gale Cengage: Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.

Powers, TM (2013). “On the Moral Agency of Computers” Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy.

Powers, TM (2011). Prospects for a Kantian Machine, in Machine Ethics, eds. M. Anderson and S. Anderson, Cambridge University Press [reprint of 2006 IEEE Intelligent Systems 21 (4)].

Powers, TM (2008). Environmental Holism and Nanotechnology, in Nanotechnology and Society:  Current and Emerging Ethical Issues, eds. F. Allhoff and P. Lin, Springer Publishing

Powers, TM (2004). Real Wrongs in Virtual Communities, in Ethics and Information Technology 5 (4), Kluwer Publishing.

Websites:

https://udel.edu/~tpowers/

https://www.udel.edu/faculty-staff/experts/thomas-powers/http://sepp.udel.edu

Bio

Bio

Biography:

Nancy Tuana is the founding director of Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute and DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies. Dr. Tuana is a philosopher of science and feminist science studies theorist who specializes in issues of ethics and science.

Dr. Tuana is part of an interdisciplinary research team at Penn State that has developed a more robust model of research ethics to more adequately reflect the impacts of ethical issues in scientific practice.  Building on this work, she is examining coupled ethical-epistemic issues in the field of climate science. She is doing this work as part of an NSF sponsored research network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management that links a transdisciplinary team of scholars at 19 universities and 5 research institutions across 6 nations to answer the question, “What are sustainable, scientifically sound, technologically feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible climate risk management strategies?  She is also doing research on feminist philosophical approaches to climate change and is guest editor, with Chris Cuomo, of the Hypatia special issue on climate change.

The Rock Ethics Institute, under her direction, had taken the lead nationally and internationally in developing innovative and deeply interdisciplinary modes of engaging in socially relevant ethics research through embedding ethical analysis into research in the sciences and engineering, and by catalyzing research on ethically responsible policy making. Current research foci include climate change ethics, food ethics, industry sponsorship of research, global ethics, and moral literacy and moral development.

Selected Publications

Tuana, Nancy (2023), Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference: An Ecointersectional Approach. Oxford University Press. 

Tuana, Nancy (2020), Values-Informed Decision Support: The Place of Philosophy, in A Guide to Field Philosophy, E. Brister and R. Frodeman (Eds.), pp. 143-159.

Tuana, Nancy. (2013). Gendering Climate Knowledge for Justice: Catalyzing a New Research Agenda. Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change. Eds. M. Alston and K. Whittenbury, pp. 14-31.

Tuana, Nancy. (2012). Embedding Philosophers in the Practices of Science: Bringing Humanities to the Sciences, Synthese.

Tuana, Nancy, Ryan Sriver, Toby Svoboda, Roman Olson, Peter J. Irvine, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Klaus Keller. (2012). Towards Integrated Ethical and Scientific Analysis of Geoengineering: A Research Agenda, Ethics, Policy and Environment Vol. 15, No. 2, 136-157.

Schienke, Erich, Seth Baum, Nancy Tuana, Ken Davis, and Klaus Keller.  (2011). Intrinsic Ethics Regarding Integrated Assessment Models for Climate Management. Science and Engineering Ethics. 17, 3:503-523.

Tuana, Nancy. (2010). Leading with Ethics, Aiming for Policy: New Opportunities for Philosophy of Science, Synthese, 177: 471-492.

Schienke, Erich, Nancy Tuana, Don Brown, Ken Davis, Klaus Keller, James Shortle, Michelle Stickler, and Seth Baum. (2009). The Role of the NSF Broader Impacts Criterion in Enhancing Research Ethics Pedagogy. Social Epistemology. 23(3-4): 317-336.

Websites

https://philosophy.la.psu.edu/people/nat3/

https://rockethics.psu.edu/people/nancy-tuana/

Bio

Sean A. Valles is Professor and Director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Justice at Michigan State University, where he is joint-appointed in the Lyman Briggs College (MSU’s residential interdisciplinary science and science studies college) and the Department of Philosophy.

Dr. Valles is a philosopher of health specializing in the ethical and evidentiary complexities of how social contexts—everything from one’s local food options to the presence or absence of exposure to violent policing practices—combine to create patterns of inequitable health disparities. His work includes studying the challenges of responsibly using race and ethnicity concepts in monitoring health disparities, scrutinizing the rhetoric of the COVID-19 pandemic as an ‘unprecedented’ problem that could not be prepared for, and examining how biomedicine meshes with public health and population health.

Dr. Valles’s desire to be an “engaged” philosopher has led him to a variety of relationships and collaborations with practicing scientists. He is a core faculty member at the Michigan State U. Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Program. He has served on an interdisciplinary research team through the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, studying the theoretical and practical aspects (including health and welfare aspects) of “evolutionary mismatch.” He has collaborated with the University of Edinburgh Ethnicity and Health Research Group (in the Centre for Population Health Sciences), working as a visiting scholar with the group in April-May 2013. Through his appointment in Lyman Briggs, an interdisciplinary science and science studies college, he has also worked with science colleagues on a State Department grant to assist the University of Duhok (in the Kurdistan region of Iraq) with revising its science curriculum, including scientific reasoning courses.

Selected Publications

Valles, S. A. (2021). Why Race and Ethnicity Are Not Like Other Risk Factors: Applying Structural Competency and Epistemic Humility in the Covid-19 Pandemic. Philosophy of Medicine, 2(1), 1-8.

Valles, S. A. (2021). The Coupled Ethical-Epistemic Model as a Resource for Feminist Philosophy of Science, and a Case Study Applying the Model to the Demography of “Hispanic” Race and Ethnicity. In H. Grasswick & N. McHugh (Eds.), Making the Case: Feminist and Critical Race Theorists Investigate Case Studies.

Valles, S. A. (2020). Philosophy of Biomedicine. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Valles, S. A. (2019). A pluralistic and socially responsible philosophy of epidemiology field should actively engage with social determinants of health and health disparities. Synthese.

Valles, S. A., Piso, Z., O’Rourke, M. (2019). Coupled Ethical-Epistemic Analysis as a Tool for Environmental Science. Ethics, Policy & Environment. 22 (3) 267-286.

Valles, S. A. (2018). Philosophy of Population Health: Philosophy for a New Public Health Era. Routledge.

Valles, S. A. (2015) Bioethics and the Framing of Climate Change’s Health Risks. Bioethics, 29(5), 334-341.

Katikireddi, S. V. and Valles, S. A. (2015) Coupled Ethical–Epistemic Analysis of Public Health Research and Practice: Categorizing Variables to Improve Population Health and Equity, American Journal of Public Health, 105 (1), e36-e42.

Valles, S.A. (2012) Heterogeneity of Risk within Racial Groups, a Challenge for Public Health Programs. Preventive Medicine, 55(5), 405-408

Valles, S.A. (2012) Should Direct to Consumer Personalized Genomic Medicine Remain Unregulated? A Rebuttal of the Defenses. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 55(2), 250-265.

Website

https://bioethics.msu.edu/directory/386-valles

Bio

Kyle Whyte is a faculty member at the University of Michigan where he is George Willis Pack Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability, University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor, and Professor of Philosophy in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

His primary research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples and the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Kyle’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Northeast Climate Science Center, Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments Center, Mellon Foundation, Sustainable Michigan Endowed Program and Spencer Foundation. He serves on the U.S. Department of Interior’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science and is involved in the Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup, Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, Everybody Eats: Cultivating Food Democracy, Humanities for the Environment, the Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Indigenous Philosophers.

Dr. Whyte formerly held the Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University and served as a faculty affiliate of the American Indian Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs. He earned his PhD in Philosophy at Stony Brook University.

Selected Publications

Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice: Ecological and Relational Tipping Points. 2020. In WIRES Climate Change.

Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises. 2018. In Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1-2): 224-242.

Settler Colonialism, Ecology and Environmental Injustice. 2018. In Environment & Society 9 (1): 125-144.

Whyte, K.P., Brewer, J.P. & Johnson, J.T. 2015. Weaving Indigenous Science, Protocols and Sustainability Science. Sustainability Science.

Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup (CTKW). 2014. Guidelines for Considering Traditional Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives. https://climatetkw.wordpress.com.

Holtgren, M., Ogren S., & Whyte KP. 2014. Renewing Relatives: Nmé Stewardship in a Shared Watershed. In Tales of Hope and Caution in Environmental Justice. A website for the Mellon Humanities for the Environment initiative.

Whyte, K.P. 2013. On the Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a Collaborative Concept: A Philosophical Study. Ecological Processes. 2(7): 1-12.

Website

ttps://kylewhyte.seas.umich.edu