Speakers

Eugenia earned her PhD in Mathematical Physics from the University of Nottingham in 2022, where she was part of the Quantum Information Group. During her doctoral studies, she was a DAAD-funded visiting student at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, collaborating with the Quantum Gravity Group. Currently, she is a joint postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Western Ontario, collaborating with both the String Theory and AdS/CFT community and the Loop Quantum Gravity community, with the aim of enhancing communication between these fields.

Her research focuses on using the gravitational path integral to develop an axiomatic framework for quantum gravity, aiming to bridge diverse quantum gravity approaches and explore gravitational entropy in contexts such as evaporating black holes. Eugenia applies quantum information techniques, including tensor networks and channel-state duality, to study holographic gravitational entropy and investigates the notion of subsystems in quantum gravity as part of the Emergent Geometries (EmerGe) collaboration. 

I am Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. 

I specialise in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of physics. I am interested in the nature of fundamental physical theories, as well as the idea of emergent physics, and the relationship between these different `levels’ of description. Much of my research has focused on effective field theory, spacetime and quantum gravity.

My current work explores the roles of principles and other non-empirical guides to scientific theory construction and evaluation. In particular, I am looking at the different non-empirical guides involved in the search for quantum gravity.

I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva 2016-2019; before this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. I received my PhD from the University of Sydney in 2015. While (and after) finishing my thesis, I spent some time visiting and teaching at the University of Cambridge. Prior to this, I completed a BA (Hons) in philosophy and a BSc (Hons) in theoretical physics at Monash University, Clayton.

Richard Dawid is professor of philosophy of science at Stockholm University. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Vienna. After some years as a phyisicist at the TU Munich and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he switched to philosophy in 2000. He worked as a philosopher of science at the University of Vienna and the MCMP Munich before coming to Stockholm in 2016. 

Dawid’s work focuses on philosophical aspects of contemporary theories in high energy physics and cosmology. His concept of non-empirical theory confirmation, developed in the book String theory and the scientific method (CUP 2013) and in a number of articles, introduces a broader perspective on theory confirmation in fundamental physics and beyond. Other topics in the philosophy of physics investigated by Dawid include Everettian quantum mechanics, issues of data analysis in high energy physics, the philosophical impact of string dualities, the cosmological multiverse and anthropic reasoning. Currently, Dawid is leading a VR-funded research project on the philosophy of cosmology. In the general philosophy of science, Dawid works on Bayesian confirmation theory, novel confirmation and various aspects of the scientific realism debate.