You can contact me by email at a.[email protected]
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ANN C THRESHER [email protected]
I'm an assistant professor at Northeastern University, with a joint appointment between the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and the School of Public Policy. I work on a range of topics including synthetic biology, invasive species, science policy, and emerging environmental technologies. Much of my work engages with themes of minimising risk while maximising benefits, as well as where and how to deploy new solutions to the environmental crisis.
More broadly I am also a philosopher of science, where I work on the ethical obligations of scientists and why we should trust science. My co-authored book 'the Tangle of Science; Reliability Beyond Method, Rigour, and Objectivity' was published in 2023. It broadly argues that we need to set aside our focus on truth in science and instead turn to the structures that underpin any given product of science to see why it gives us useful results. I am also a member of the History, Philosophy and Culture working group for the next generation Event Horizon Telescope where I lead a focus group working on the ethical aspects of telescope siting, including environmental and social impacts. This work is informed by my Physics degree, and I also work in the philosophy of physics where I have written on space-time topology and the philosophy of time. More information on all of these topics can be found on my research page. Prior to my appointment at Northeastern I was a post-doc at Stanford University in the McCoy Family Center for Ethics working with the new School for Sustainability and completed a PhD in philosophy at UC San Diego. As well as founding the queer phenomenology reading groups at Stanford and UCSD, I have acted as the founding chair of the UCSD department climate committee, work as a grant reviewer for the Stanford Ethics in Society Review Board, given talks at San Diego Comic-Con, and previously worked for the Royal London Mathematical society where I organised conferences, museum exhibitions, artist in residence projects, documentaries, and collaborations with the London Science Museum, the Institute for Physics, and the Royal Astronomical Society. More about my CV can be found here. |
Photo credit: Alex Gillaspy