From 2009-2014, I was a post-doc at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany.  From 2009-2012, I was a part of animal emotionale II, a three-year interdisciplinary project funded by The Volkswagen Foundation, within the initiative “Key Issues in the Humanities”.  In this project I focused on the issue of evolutionary explanations of emotion, especially disgust, continuing and expanding the work I began in my doctoral dissertation.  As part of this project I organized a conference on the Evolution of Disgust: From Oral to Moral. 

In 2010 I was also a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, based in the UCLA Anthropology Department.

In 2013 I joined the Changing Brains Project funded by The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung), in which we will examine a wide variety of theoretical and ethical issues associated with brain plasticity.  I focused primarily on two sub-projects: “Neural Reuse and Evo-Devo: A Conceptual Structure for Taxonomizing Plasticity “, and “Plasticity in Addiction: How the Brain Changes in Addiction, and How Addicts’ Perceptions of Changeability Impact Treatment and Recovery”.  As part of this project I co-organized a conference on Neuroplasticity in Addiction: From Genes to Culture and Back Again.