Research Interests

Most of my research focuses on causal reasoning in biology. Most models in biology describe inherently causal phenomena without providing predictions of what would happen to one variable given an intervention on another variable. These models are consequently only implicitly causal. The aim of my research is to develop an understanding of causal systems in the biological sciences through the tools of explicit causal reasoning. This research is important to both philosophy and biology. From the point of view of philosophy, causal reasoning is part of a long tradition of understanding and representing rational inference, more generally. From the point of view of biology, I attempt to show that causal modeling is an obligatory practice for various biological domains. My published work has so far focused on causally modeling the process of adaptation. However, in current work, I deal with legitimate notions of inter-level causation, permissible notions of biological individuals or units, and robustness between causal models. More recently, I have also become interested in various issues at the intersection of causal modeling, abstract object theory, and value theory.