I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Normative Orders Research Institute at the Goethe University Frankfurt, and earned my PhD in philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

My research is focused primarily in the areas of bioethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of medicine/psychiatry, and centres on questions around personal identity, the nature of mental disorders, natural kinds, and healthcare access issues for marginalized populations.

My PhD dissertation investigates the intersection between biological approaches to psychiatry, natural kinds, psychiatric nosology, and the practice of utilizing statistical information about mental disorders to inform health care policy pertaining to those disorders. I argue in favour of the claim that mental disorders are natural kinds and for the adoption of a psychiatric nosological system informed by this claim, on account of its forecasted improvements to the accuracy of psychiatric prognostication, diagnosis, and classification, due to the reliable causal inferences such a system enables. However, I caution strongly against the uncritical use of said inferences in the formulation of (mental) health policy, as they are made on the level of category, rather than the individual.

My postdoctoral research project is focused on the intersection of institutional norms, individual and institutional strategic goals, policy formulation, and the differing approaches to the metaphysics of disease employed in these contexts. I aim to demonstrate that (1) resolving at least some issues of injustice in health care (access, provision, research, etc.) will require recognizing that there is no single concept of disease that can perform the work it is meant to across all relevant contexts, and (2) that disease concepts employed in policymaking must track the relevant legitimate strategic aims of stakeholders, and that this is consistent across contexts and institutions whose aims justifiably align.