Hello and welcome! I'm currently a sixth year Ph.D. candidate in the department of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. 

I am a moral philosopher with a specific focus on recent interactions between ethics and science. In particular, I investigate to what extent empirical research can weigh in on ethical and metaethical debates. 

Here are some particular research questions that I attempt to answer:
​
–To what extent was moral belief shaped by evolution and/or culture?
–If our moral beliefs were shaped by evolution, can we know moral facts?
–Do evolutionary explanations of virtue and desert debunk their intrinsic value?
​–Can neuroscience tilt the standoff between deontology and consequentialism?
–Does social psychology undermine the fundamental assumptions of virtue ethics?

I also have interests in applied ethics (esp. ethics of AI and medical ethics), political philosophy, cognitive science, philosophy of biology, and evolutionary theory. 

After growing up in a small town in Idaho, I earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Vassar College and an M.A. in Philosophy from Brandeis University. During my time between Brandeis and UT-Austin, I was a researcher in Susan Carey's Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard, and I am currently a member of Bertram Gawronski's Social Cognition Lab at UT-Austin.