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. |