Research

Most of my research is on philosophy of physics, driven and informed by questions from the history of science and (feminist) philosophy of science more broadly, as well as theoretical and mathematical physics.

My main research area is on the quantum field theories (QFTs) underpinning the standard model of particle physics (SM). These QFTs have demonstrated remarkable success, ranging from unprecedentedly accurate predictions with great statistical significance to opening new avenues of inquiry in the physical sciences and mathematics. But QFT has been plagued by significant conceptual and mathematical challenges throughout its history. Just a few years before the consolidation of the SM in the 1970s, QFT was on its deathbed—or so the orthodoxy goes. How should we describe and explain this shift from disreputable to exemplary science? The first chapter of my dissertation discusses the explanation for QFT's eventual success that a variety of scientific realism localized to QFT, "effective realism," would provide. Email me for a draft! The rest of my dissertation examines the historical developments leading up to the inflection point in the uptake of QFT between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In particular, I focus on attempts to extend perturbation theory, the main approximation technique for studying QFT, and on how these efforts led to discoveries such as asymptotic freedom, widely recognized as catalysts for the uptake of QFT and the SM. My historical analysis lays the groundwork for reorienting the question of QFT's success from one about the theory's truth or empirical adequacy to one about the fruitfulness of certain practices of particle physicists across different contexts.

My secondary research area within the philosophy of physics focuses on how the mathematical structures of quantum theories codify their physical content and explores more appropriate ways of doing so. You can find my papers in this area here.

Aside from philosophy and the history of physics, I've worked on:

• Early Greek science, particularly that practiced by the Presocratics and Hippocratic doctors. I’ve published a book chapter surveying early Greek science and its traces on Aristophanes’ Clouds, titled “El ‘Sócrates presocrático’ de Las Nubes de Aristófanes” [The ‘Presocratic Socrates’ in Aristophanes’ Clouds], as a commentary essay to a translation I did with my undergraduate Greek translation group back in Colombia.

• Inclusive pedagogies in and for philosophy, primarily in courses considered “technical” (e.g., formal methods, logic, and philosophy of physics). Thomas Colclough, Helen Meskhidze, and I designed and ran a study in two formal logic courses, implementing interventions informed by inclusive pedagogies. Our paper, “Feminist and Trauma-Informed Approaches to Teaching Formal Philosophy,” is forthcoming in Hypatia. See also our “Changing the Way We Teach Formal Philosophy” for a summary of the project in the Women in Philosophy Series of the APA blog.