I am Director of University at Albany’s AI & Society College and Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy.
I was a Civil Discourse Faculty Fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University during my 2025-26 sabbatical leave from University at Albany. Previous to that I was Principal Investigator for Trustworthy AI from a User Perspective, a multi-year project funded by a grant from the SUNY-IBM AI Research Alliance and serve as the Faculty Advisor for UAlbany’s vibrant Minorities and Philosophy Chapter.
I work primarily on the topics of trust, promising, apology, rationalization, and self-deception. In recent years, much my work on these topics has extended in fascinating ways to human interaction with artificial intelligence. My philosophical work has appeared in Analysis, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Philosophical Psychology, Ratio, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Recent collaborative and interdisciplinary work in AI ethics appears in the CACM and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. My review of John Doris’s Character Trouble came out recently in Philosophical Review.and my review of Thomas Simpsons’s Trust: A Philosophical Study is forthcoming in Ethics. See my Research page for links to published and forthcoming papers.
I enjoy engaging with audiences beyond academia. I was thrilled to do an episode of Sing for Science with musician Sean Ono Lennon and psychologist Anat Perry. I also enjoyed this conversation with Aviva Bower and teaching and AI. Here’s a snippet for public radio’s Academic Minute and talks at Oxford’s Wellcome Center for Ethics and Humanities and Penn State’s Rock Center for Ethics. I’ve done roundtables for the Chronicle of Higher Ed roundtable (on AI and research) and a Data and Society (on trust and technology).
In summer 2024 I participated in the NEH Summer Institute in moral psychology at Cornell. During Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 I was a visiting scholar at the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRE) at Université de Montréal. From 2008-2009 I taught at the Harvard Writing Program, and from 2000-2001 I taught at the Zhejiang University of Science and Technology. In 2002 I worked as a research assistant at the University of Toronto Joint Center for Bioethics. I completed a BA from Yale in 2000 and a PhD from Brown in 2009.
