Dr. Cristin Chall

I am a Philosopher of Science by training. I am currently an Operations Research Analyst in the Strategic Wargaming Division at the Center for Army Analysis, an appointment I earned as a 2020 Fellow of the Presidential Management Fellowship. As a PMF, I have done rotations as a Research Assistant at RAND's Arroyo Center and as an Arctic Policy Advisor in the office of Arctic & Global Resilience in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Policy. I hope to continue to dip my toes into philosophy as I progress through government service. 

In December 2019, I completed my doctorate from the University of South Carolina, with a project concerning the progress in physics that goes beyond our experimental abilities. I completed my dissertation while working within the German Science Foundation (DFG)-funded The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider project, which I joined in January 2017.  

My primary philosophical interests were in the general philosophy of science, the philosophy of physics, and epistemology. My dissertation research explored the epistemic challenges raised by theories and models that are beyond our capacity to test empirically: is this conceptual work really science and, if so, how can confirmation, explanation, and progress be understood when experimental confirmation is difficult or impossible to obtain for practical reasons? 

I have taught both graduate and undergraduate courses, including African American philosophy, the philosophy of time, the philosophy of particle physics, engineering ethics, and a lot of symbolic logic. As a teaching assistant, I was assigned to courses covering the philosophy of emotions, the philosophical implications of future technologies, and introductory epistemology. In my teaching, I focused on providing the critical thinking and analytic reasoning that philosophical work requires, but I also connected philosophical topics to my students' non-academic experiences, especially regarding issues of social justice and the application of ethics.

Besides my academic and teaching interests, I enjoy reading fiction (mostly science fiction and fantasy), playing tabletop games (I like overly complicated boardgames and will happily GM a roleplaying game for friends), and spending with my amazing wife, Alicia, and our son, Kaiel.