Research Overview

Epistemology and Ethics of AI

My current research is on epistemological, ethical, and political questions that arise when using AI and automation in scientific practice.

Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

My research concerns evidence, causation, and values in the biomedical sciences. I examine how researchers reason about causally complex systems such as the gut–brain–microbiota axis, how methods and findings are transported across contexts in emerging fields like exposomics (the comprehensive study of the “exposome”: the totality of environmental, lifestyle, and psychosocial exposures an individual experiences over a lifetime, and how these factors interact with our genetics and biology to influence health and disease).

History of Medicine

I work on the history of public health in early twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand, tracing how eugenic and racial ideas became embedded in institutions and print culture. My current project examines eugenic ideology in the Whānau Āwhina Plunket Society, building on earlier work on how ethnographic theories were used to explain Māori mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic.