I’m York Research Chair in Animal Minds and Professor of Philosophy at York University, and I’ve been working on issues related to the science of animal cognition and behavior for more than 20 years. I am the author of Do Apes Read Minds: Toward a New Folk Psychology, The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition, co-author of Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief and co-editor with Jacob Beck of The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Animal Minds. My current book project is on the evolution of normative cognition, which I argue is necessary for the development of a moral system. I’ve written a few papers on normativity and morality in animals that form the basis of this research.

Professor Emerita, University of Toronto

I’m an associate professor in the psychology and biology departments at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. I’m a former student of Sara Shettleworth (see below) and am interested in a wide range of topics in animal cognition. However, my research tends to focus on questions about social behavior, social learning, and collective cognition. I am a strong believer in the importance of combining theoretical and empirical studies on the same systems. In an attempt to explore the range of social structures that different species create, my students and I study any species we can; to date: rats, pigeons, quail, zebrafish, guppies, golden shiners, blind cave fish, garter snakes, ball pythons, and humans. Presumably, there are some fundamental rules of social interaction that are more-or-less common to all these systems, and we hope to specify and quantify those rules.

I'm a philosopher of animal minds and animal ethicist, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna. Most of my work is on animal social cognition and its ethical implications, and I focus especially on the topics of animal morality and animals' understanding of death.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University, where I am also a member of the Centre for Vision Research and a Core Member of the Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program. ​​I received my PhD in Philosophy from UCLA in Spring 2018. From 2018-2019 I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, at the University of Antwerp. I work mainly in philosophy of mind/psychology/perception and I am interested in mentality wherever it appears in nature. My research focuses on how humans and other animals perceive the world to be organized, how their perception of the world is itself organized, and how the structure of perception relates to the perception of structure. I am a recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for my project "Forms of Mind," which investigates how perception can support beliefs virtue of the format or structure of perceptual states.