I'm a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester in New York. Before that, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, and a Lecturer in Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. I received my PhD from the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP) program at Washington University in St. Louis in 2017. I work primarily on scientific explanation and, increasingly, on metaontology, where I defend a normativist/conventionalist view of modality and metaphilosophy.

My dissertation, Model and World: Generalizing the Ontic Conception of Scientific Explanation, defends a theory of scientific explanation that I call the “Generalized Ontic Conception” (GOC): A model explains when and only when it provides (approximately) veridical information about the ontic structures on which the explanandum phenomenon depends. Causal and mechanistic explanations are species of GOC in which the ontic structures on which the explanandum phenomenon depends are causes and mechanisms, respectively, and the kinds of dependence involved are causal and constitutive/mechanistic, respectively. The kind of dependence relation about which information is provided determines the species of the explanation. This provides an intuitive typology of explanations and opens the possibility for non-causal, non-mechanistic explanations that provide information about non-causal, non-mechanistic kinds of dependence. What unites all these forms of explanation is that, by providing information about the ontic structures on which the explanandum phenomenon depends, they can answer what-if-things-had-been-different questions (w-questions) about the explanandum phenomenon. This is what makes causal explanations, mechanistic explanations, and non-causal, non-mechanistic explanations all explanations.

Other than philosophy, I enjoy hiking, sand volleyball, exercising, DnD, and animals - especially rodents.