Research

Personal Academic Research

My dissertation focuses on how the development of AI tools for psychotherapy can/will alter the nature of the patient-therapist relationship. A poster summarizing the direction of my dissertation can be found on the right.

The majority of my work focuses on current issues in bioethics, philosophy of medicine and psychiatry, and philosophy of science. Within the field of bioethics I have particular interests in trust, pandemic ethics and public/global health ethics more generally. Some of this applied work ties in with areas in philosophy of mind, and I am particularly interested in the possibility of extended emotions as derived from the extended mind literature.

I wrote my MA thesis on ethical issues in crowdfunding for academic research. This effort marked one of the first long-form works exploring the ethical and equity-based issues with the small but growing number of researchers turning to crowdfunding sites to support their academic research projects. My full thesis is available here.

Other Academic Research

In addition to my individual research, I have had multiple opportunities to work with (bio)ethics-adjacent research groups across Canada.

Applications of AI in Organ Donation

Since 2022 I have been an active member of the Periscope Lab, run by my supervisor, Dr. Karina Vold. One of our ongoing projects is concerned with evaluating the ethical issues present in applying AI tools to organ donation and allocation.

Ethical dimensions of mental health care

Between March and August of 2023 I worked as a research trainee with the Bioethics/Education Department and Everyday Ethics Lab at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health on projects related to pain and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccinations in transition-age youth. A paper on AI usage in pain diagnostics is now published in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy.

Ethical pathways in COVID-19 research and development

Between 2020 and early 2023 I worked with Dr. Maxwell Smith and the Health Ethics, Law and Policy Lab at Western University on a range of projects related to ethical issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have published multiple papers in The Lancet, and BMJ Global Health. The latter is my first, first-author publication.

As a member of this research team, I also served as a member of the World Health Organization's Access to COVID Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) Governance Subworking Group. We published a paper summarizing our findings in The Lancet.

Crowdfunding narratives and vaccine valuation

In 2021 I had the opportunity to work with academics at Simon Fraser University and the University of Guelph on a project related to my previous experience working on philosophical issues related to crowdfunding. Our work was published in Vaccine in 2022.

Global health ethics work

During my MA, I had the chance to work as a research assistant at the Institute on Ethics and Policy for Innovation at McMaster University. There, I assisted in the preparation of multiple guidance documents on global health ethics.

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