Our first piece of exciting news in this bi-monthly post comes from Francesca Vidotto. Francesca was named Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Foundations of Physics in June. The CRC program is designed to attract and retain some of the world’s most accomplished and promising minds in engineering, natural sciences, health sciences, humanities and social sciences [...]
We'd like to start off this post by sharing some exciting news from Becky Ellis and John Lehmann. Becky (supervised by Tony Weis) defended her PhD thesis tilted “Pollinator People: an ethnography of bees, bee advocates, and possibilities for multispecies commoning in Toronto and London,ON” on April 15th via Zoom and John (supervised by Robert DiSalle) [...]
This article, Three Postdoctoral Associates in Philosophy Focus on AI, is reprinted with permission from Western's Faculty of Arts & Humanities. Artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies pose new opportunities and challenges across many domains of our lives. Philosophers are uniquely equipped to address the underlying assumptions and potential conflicts that arise from integrating these [...]
Our first piece of exciting news in this bi-monthly post comes from Craig Fox. Craig (supervised by Chris Smeenk) defended his PhD thesis tilted "An Empiricist Defense of Scientific Stories About the Past" on March 18th via Zoom. Congratulations, Craig! Our next piece of exciting news comes from Rotman alumna Marie Gueguen. Marie was awarded an MSCA [...]
Marie Gueguen is an alumnus of the Rotman Institute, who completed her doctorate under the supervision of Chris Smeenk in 2019. She was recently awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Individual Fellowship (IF) grant by the European Commission. Her unique project will embed her in a research group working with molecular physicists and astrochemists--one of [...]
Niels Linnemann worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the New Directions in Philosophy of Cosmology grant project, with principal investigator Chris Smeenk. His fellowship came to end in January 2021, but he will continue working with Chris and other collaborators on the project. And as the situation with COVID improves & travel is permitted we [...]
Bartek Chomanski is in his second year as a postdoc at the Rotman Institute, on a fellowship jointly funded with the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, the Faculty of Science, and the Faculty of Engineering. He has research interests in philosophy of mind and the ethics of emerging technologies, especially AI and robotics. He recently completed [...]
We'd like to start this post with exciting news from Ben Chin-Yee. Ben was awarded the 2020 Compassion and Technology AMS Fellowship for his research on the impact of genomics and artificial intelligence on equity and compassionate care in oncology in his research. Please join us in congratulating Ben on this wonderful achievement! In the last [...]
2020 brought forth many challenges, but with the academic term coming to an end we'd like to highlight some special achievements from our members this past year. One of our graduate student members successfully defended his doctoral thesis this year: Jiangtian Li (supervised by Rob Stainton) defended his PhD thesis tilted “On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, [...]
The institute’s annual public library lecture series took place this month. All talks were given virtually via Zoom. This year’s series, titled "Responsibilities to Others", featured engaging talks by Samir Okasha, Tracy Isaacs, Anthony Skelton, and Maneesha Deckha. The series included discussions about the evolution of altruism, moral responsibilities, how moral philosophy might assist us in thinking about whether we ought to mandate [...]
