Where are they now?

Ramya M. Rajagopalan

Ramya M. Rajagopalan earned her Ph.D. in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and completed postdoctoral fellowships in sociology and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ramya’s work uses ethnographic and archival methods to examine the social impacts of genome technologies and big data in biomedicine. In one strand of her research, she has analyzed debates about the meaning and significance of genetic variation for social categories of identity like race.

Amy Zhou

2018 – 2019

Amy Zhou earned her bachelor's degree and Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Practical Ethics 2018 – 2019. She is a medical sociologist interested in health inequalities in the United States and global setting. She left the institute to become an assistant professor in the sociology department at Barnard College.

At the institute, Amy conducted research on the social and ethical implications of gene drive technologies. She published the article “Therapeutic citizens and clients: diverging healthcare practices in Malawi's prenatal clinics,” in Sociology of Health & Illness (Wiley Online).

Daniel Callies

2018 – 2021

Born and raised in Southern California, Daniel Edward Callies received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from San Diego State University, returning to be awarded a master's degree for his thesis “Equality, Responsibility, and Climate Policy.” In 2013, he began a Ph.D. at Goethe University Frankfurt under the supervision of Professor Darrel Moellendorf.

Daniel defended his dissertation “On the Ethics and Politics of Climate Engineering,” then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Goethe University until joining the Institute for Practical Ethics in fall 2018. He left to pursue a clinical ethics fellowship with the Health Ethics Center at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

His book "Climate Engineering: A Normative Perspective" was published in July 2019 and "takes as its subject a prospective policy response to the urgent problem of climate change, one previously considered taboo."

Jacob Sparks

2019 – 2020

Jacob Sparks earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and a Ph.D. in applied philosophy from Bowling Green State University. After his time with the institute, he became an assistant professor in the philosophy department at California Polytechnic State University.

At the institute, Jacob worked on ethical issues surrounding privacy and automation. He’s especially interested in questions about the importance of privacy to agency, about what it would take for a machine to be capable of making moral distinctions, and about whether privacy rights should be understood as property rights in personal data.

April Hovav

2019 – 2021

April Hovav earned a Ph.D. in sociology with a certificate in gender studies from the University of Southern California. After her time with the institute, she accepted a postdoc position at Occidental College. 

In one line of research, she examines the relationship between developments in medical technologies and the emergence of new global markets through which women’s bodies are leveraged as a source of capital. Her article “Producing Moral Palatability in the Mexican Surrogacy Industry,” was published in Gender & Society.  

At the institute for Practical Ethics, she conducted research on the social and ethical implications of using gene drive technologies to combat malaria.

Athmeya Jayaram

2019 – 2021

Athmeya Jayaram earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Amherst College and a Ph.D. in political theory at the University of California Berkeley. After his time with the institute, Jayaram accepted a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.

Athmeya’s research concerns the justice and justification of emerging technologies. His doctoral dissertation “Public Reason and Private Bias” proposes a new way to justify laws and decision-making procedures to ordinary citizens, given their limited information and inevitable biases.

One line of research concerns the relationship between corporations and democracy, including the duty of social-media companies to foster productive deliberation and the ethics of powerful companies pressuring local governments for concessions. A second line of research addresses the technologies themselves, such as the justification of genetic screening for disabilities and the ethics of gene drive technologies.

Samantha Berthelette

2020 – 2021

Tarun Kalluri

2020 – 2021

Elizabeth Mayes

2020 – 2021

Ke Nie

2020 – 2021

Eddie Yang

2020 – 2021

Keyao Yang

2020 – 2021

Jacob Zellmer

2020 – 2021

Colin M. Burke

2019 – 2020

Davide Carpano

Eugene Chua

Daniel Driscoll

Ross Graham

Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer

Cami Koepke

JiMin Kwon

2018 – 2019

Chuncheng Liu

2019 – 2020

Edward Randolph

Sarah Stembridge

Riley I. Taitingfong

2018 – 2019

Ann Thresher

Jada Wiggleton-Little

Bolun Zhang

Megan Blomfield

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

Bryan Cwik

Sofia Efstathiou

April – July 2018

While a visiting scholar at the Institute for Practical Ethics, Sophia Efstathiou was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She works in philosophy of science, ethics of technology and art-based approaches to philosophy and responsible research and innovation.

Saveetha Meganathan

October 2019 – September 2021

While a visiting scholar at the Institute for Practical Ethics, Saveetha Meganathan is a research scientist at the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society in Bangalore, India. She has consulted for Give2Asia, a nonprofit helping communities meet philanthropic goals. At the institute, Saveetha will research the ethics of gene drives as it relates to India.

S. Andrew Schroeder

July 2020 – December 2021

S. Andrew Schroeder an associate professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. His research and teaching cover a range of topics in ethics, political philosophy, bioethics, the philosophy of disability and the philosophy of science. Schroeder was the recipient of the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars 2020, from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Elliott Sober

January – March 2020

Elliott Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His most recent book, "Ockham's Razors - A User's Manual," was published in July 2015 by Cambridge University Press.

Thilo Hagendorff

November – December 2021

Thilo Hagendorff is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Tuebingen's Cluster of Excellence "Machine Learning" (Germany). He is an expert in applied ethics, especially technology and AI ethics. His research concerns methodological questions of AI ethics as well as specific subfields like industry involvement, publications norms, quality data, or privacy in AI research.
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Cedric Whitney

Eric Winsberg