I am a doctoral student in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and hold a master's in Philosophy from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A central commitment of my continued research program at the intersection of philosophical psychology, moral psychology, and Buddhist philosophy is to ground investigation of long-standing philosophical questions in rigorous empirical research.

With Dr. Evan Thompson of the University of Toronto Philosophy Department, I have been developing a series of theoretical articles integrating central suggestions from early Buddhist accounts of body and mind with recent work in cognitive science and philosophy of cognitive science, focusing especially on how such a cross-cultural approach can help refine our understanding of how attention and consciousness are developed in mindfulness practice. In parallel to this theoretical exploration, with Dr. Judson Brewer of the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic, I have been engaged in a practical investigation of the role of such mindful awareness in treatment of addiction and in the subjective experience of advanced meditators. With Dr. Willoughby Britton and the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Brown University, I am a collaborator on a number of projects investigating the trajectory of contemplative development, and serve as a consultant and mindfulness instructor for an NIH-funded investigation of the efficacy of separate components of mindfulness-based therapies, comparing focused awareness with open monitoring.

I am currently completing my doctoral dissertation in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, under the supervision of Dr. Jesse Prinz. Drawing on recent research on attention, emotion, and moral psychology, I argue that the relative ease or unease characteristic of various types of emotional motivations can ground a circumscribed set of universal ethical truths. On this account, ill-will is a bad thing (if it is) just because individuals who are fully and accurately aware of episodes of ill-will feel for themselves how unpleasant it is. Conversely, goodwill is a good thing (if it is) just because individuals who are fully and accurately aware of episodes of goodwill feel for themselves how much more ease there is in that kind of an emotional state. More generally, our ability to converge on a thorough and unbiased awareness of the relative ease and dis-ease of various types of emotion can ground a circumscribed set of universal claims about which sort of emotional motivations are good ones to have and which are not, while leaving many other aspects of how we ought to live open to cultural determination.