I am a University Associate Professor in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science. I received my PhD in Philosophy and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego in 2013 and was a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis before coming to Cambridge in 2014. My research focuses on nonhuman animal cognition, mechanistic explanation, and artificial intelligence.
I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Fellow of Selwyn College.
Research interests
General philosophy of science (experimentation, explanation, modeling, the new mechanistic philosophy), philosophy of psychology and cognitive science (comparative psychology, nonhuman animal cognition and communication, cognitive ethology, embodied and distributed cognition, neuroscience), philosophy of biology (mechanistic explanation and discovery, model organisms).
Selected publications
'Replications in Comparative Psychology' Animal Behavior and Cognition (forthcoming)
'Insightful Artificial Intelligence' Mind & Language, 1-15 (2021)
'Minds, Machines, and Molecules' (with T. D. P. Brunet). Philosophical Topics, 48(1) (2020)
'The Animal-AI Testbed and Competition' (with Crosby et al.) Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2019 Competition and Demonstration Track, PMLR 123: 164-176 (2020)
'Apply Rich Psychological Terms in AI with Care' (with Henry Shevlin). Nature Machine Intelligence, 1: 165-167 (2019)
'Not Null Enough: Pseudo-Null Hypotheses in Community Ecology and Comparative Psychology' (with William Bausman). Biology & Philosophy, 33(30): 1-20 (2018)
'The Goal of Ape Pointing' (with Katja Liebal and Michael Tomasello). PLOS ONE, 13(4):e0195182 (2018)
'There is No Special Problem of Mindreading in Nonhuman Animals' Philosophy of Science, 82: 473-490 (2015)
'The Ontogenetic Ritualization of Bonobo Gestures' (with Federico Rossano and Michael Tomasello). Animal Cognition, 16(4): 653-666 (2013).
For a full list of publications, please see here.
