I am a graduate student in the philosophy department at UC Davis. I work mostly on the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of science. Generally speaking, I am interested in the nature of scientific reasoning. I have done some work on the role of simplicity in theory selection, and more recently I've been working on understanding how the various goals we have in science shape research strategies, heuristics, and inference. My main project is an attempt to understand the pragmatic dimensions of essentialist thinking in a few different areas of biology; lately, I have been focused on invasion biology.
I also have interests in general epistemology, bioethics, and early analytic philosophy. I'm currently working on a project elucidating some of the views of F. P. Ramsey.
I'm a member of the Griesemer Lab.
In the spring of 2007 I was a visiting student at the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences. I worked with Andrew Hamilton on some conceptual issues in the evolution of social insect colonies and I contributed to an experiment being conducted on honeybee foraging behavior in the Robert Page Lab.