My research specialization is epistemology, the field of philosophy that examines the nature, sources, and limitations of knowledge. My dissertation will be a selection of articles on topics within the ethics of belief, a subfield of epistemology concerned with rational and ethical norms that govern how we should form beliefs. I am interested in both ‘traditional’ and ‘social’ epistemology, as well as their applications to philosophy of science, philosophy of law, bioethics, and governance of emerging technologies. For example, to what extent should we proportion our beliefs to available evidence? If two scientific theories are both compatible with a given body of evidence, can we pick between theories arbitrarily? Is statistical evidence deficient compared to other types of evidence? Under what circumstances is it acceptable for a layperson to go against expert opinion?

In short, and perhaps unpopularly, I am presently an internalist, evidentialist, and peer disagreement egoist who thinks identifiable evidence trumps statistical evidence, but that public policy measures directed at saving ‘statistical persons’ can trump measures that would save fewer ‘identifiable’ persons.

I have additional research interests in ethics, particularly effective altruism, that stem from my nonprofit work. I’m particularly interested in cause prioritization under uncertainty and the moral psychology of charity. I’ve twice been a guest at the Global Priorities Institute (now defunct) at Oxford and I’ve volunteered as a Giving Games organizer—a project of Giving What We Can and Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save—to teach people about charitable giving and what makes one cause more impactful than another, raising money for the world’s most effective charities.

I have had work accepted to conferences around the world, e.g. the Goethe Epistemology Meeting, SOPhiA Young Analytic Philosophy, etc. I have also won a Collegiality & Scholarship Excellence Award (granted to 10 graduate researchers university-wide), a Center for Humanities and the Arts Summer Fellowship, and I became the first humanities graduate student in the history of CU to win it’s Brown-Ricketts-Udick Fellowship from the American Association of University Women.

My areas of competence include epistemology, symbolic logic, ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, Ancient philosophy, technology ethics, and social problems.

I regularly serve as a teaching assistant and have approximately 75 undergraduate students each semester. I am responsible for grading, designing assignments and assessments, lecturing and discussion groups, and office hours.

Courses I’ve taught include:
Global Issues and International Affairs
Contemporary Social Problems
Intro to Philosophy
Symbolic Logic x2
Knowledge, Mind, and Reality
Critical Thinking
Philosophy and the Sciences
Ethics and Information Technology

I’ve also been a guest lecturer at UNC Chapel Hill covering a segment on capital punishment, I helped start two ongoing philosophy reading groups at Colorado public libraries, and I regularly participate in pedagogy workshops through CU’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

I was recognized with a Teaching Excellence Award on the basis of my pedagogy and my course evaluations, and I won a funded spot in the APA’s Mentoring the Mentors workshop.

I grew up in humble and hostile circumstances, and I had to live with five different families to make it through my senior year of high school before winning a scholarship to attend university. There, I had in mind becoming some kind of economic policy consultant with the World Bank or IMF to be of service to others. But, I realised I was incredibly lucky to find great mentors in my teachers and I became inspired to become a professor who could be part of both rigorous intellectual work, as well as a community of innovative doers. Consequently, I’ve put an unusual amount of effort into becoming the best teacher I can be, both in terms of scholarship and mentorship. I include a handful of course evaluations below, which I take to be a representative sample as there are many more just like them for all of my classes. These evaluations are submitted anonymously and are only released to faculty after final grades have been submitted.

For several years I have led my department’s chapter of Minorities and Philosophy, an organization that removes barriers to philosophy for students from underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds. My annual mentorship program matches 20-35 undergraduates to faculty and graduate mentors, and my latest graduate school application workshop had 100 registrants from around the world. For these and other efforts, I won the President’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award as the sole student awardee across CU Boulder, CU Denver, Anschutz Medical School, and CU Colorado Springs (67, 843 students!).

Outside of philosophy, I’ve also worked as a Youth Support Specialist at a residential program from homeless Colorado teens experiencing mental health issues and drug abuse, I completed a year of full-time volunteer work at a refugee resettlement field office managing their education department, volunteered five years teaching English to Syrian refugees, served on Vermont State’s list of disaster responders (mobilizing a temporary homeless shelter during deadly weather), participated in environmental restoration field work, served on the California State Commission for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and more.

I began volunteering conscientiously in middle school. For six years from 7-12th grade I served food and provided company in my town’s ‘community supper,’ a weekly dinner for homeless and low income families. Each summer I organized school supplies for low income students, each winter I organized holiday presents for low income families, each autumn, I helped facilitate safe Halloween activities for elementary children, and each spring, I visited elders living out their days in convalescent hospitals. Being from a small town with harsh winters instills in one a strong sense of responsibility for one’s community. This sense of commitment to helping others is what ultimately drew me into philosophy. While my focus these days is research and teaching and I volunteer less than I did in college and high school, I still find ways to make myself ‘useful’ in whatever community I find myself in, and, increasingly, find ways to arc my scholarship into addressing impactful topics.

I am from a small town in rural Northern California (population 1,000) where I was raised by my late grandmother. I am Native American and grew up attending indigenous summer camps based around traditional ecological knowledge, such as forest stewardship (the U.S. Forest Service now actively works with tribes to employ indigenous forestry practices such as controlled burns and selective harvesting). Each generation of women from my great grandmother to me has at some point worked as a cleaner. I am the first in my family to attend university.

I started college as an economics major with math and nonprofit minors, but I switched to philosophy after being inspired by Amartya Sen’s welfare economics. I continue to read extensively in international development, reinforcing my interests in effective altruism. Previously, I wanted to double major in film studies, but my scholarship grantor wouldn’t allow ‘unserious’ majors. (They only accepted my switching to philosophy because they thought I may go to law school.) My favorite directors are Krzysztof Kieślowski and Hirokazu Koreeda.

I enjoy tennis, literature, detective shows, kdramas, boardgames, and cooking. My favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov and I regularly reflect on the idea of ‘active love’ and the tension between loving humanity in the abstract and loving one’s neighbor in the flesh.

I see epistemology and ethics as deeply intertwined and I am becoming a professor to make both theoretical and practical progress on the topics of interest to me that, I believe, are also of service to others.