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My research focuses on different philosophical issues that arise in the scientific study of psychological processes and their neurobiological correlates. I’m especially interested in conscious experience, and the functions it serves in information processing systems. Other topics of interest in philosophy and cognitive science include emotion, perception, and bias.

I recently taught a range of courses in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at York University, including Philosophy of Psychology, Philosophy of Neuroscience, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, and the Cognitive Science Honours Seminar.

I currently hold a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For the first year of my Fellowship, I worked as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, under the supervision of Ned Block. This productive year culminated in a conference that I organized and spoke at on the Functions of Consciousness.

For the second year, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, working under the supervision of Muhammad Ali Khalidi. Here, I will continue to pursue a range of projects within the cognitive sciences. One strand of my research aims to identify specific functions that consciousness facilitates in perceptual and emotional processing. I also write about more abstract issues in this area, such as rejecting the search for a “general theory” of consciousness in favour of a pluralistic approach. Finally, I have projects on the go, for example, on emotional co-regulation, habituation, and pain/pleasure.

Dissertation: The Functional Contributions of Consciousness (July 2022) *Awarded York University Faculty of Graduate Studies’ Dissertation Prize

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