Team
Lisa Bortolotti and Anneli Jefferson
Lisa is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham (UK). She works in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences and her main interest is in irrational beliefs. From September 2015 to September 2016, Lisa dedicated 20% of her time to the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project. Lisa was also leading a project called PERFECT, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, from October 2014 to September 2019, focusing on the pragmatic and epistemic benefits of imperfect cognitions. One of the case studies the ERC project looked at was optimistically biased beliefs.
From September 2015 to May 2016, Anneli worked as a Research Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham, dedicating 70% of her time to the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project. She was then a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham and is now Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. Anneli was a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Institute for Neuroscience in Medicine at the Research Centre Jülich (Germany) from June 2011 to May 2014. Anneli's main research interests are in the philosophy of psychology and ethics, especially in topics at the intersection between these areas.