People

Alastair Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. He works in metaphysics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of science and epistemology. As PI of FraMEPhys he is developing a new general framework for understanding non-causal forms of explanation as they are employed in physics. Prior to FraMEPhys, his research focus has been on the metaphysics of quantum mechanics, culminating in his book The Nature of Contingency which is out now with Oxford University Press. Twitter: @modalizing

Katie Robertson is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and a Research Associate with the FraMEPhys project; she was a FraMEPhys Research Fellow from 2018-2021. Katie is currently working on the role that entropy plays in physics, from black holes to the direction of time. She received a PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge on the foundations of thermal physics; prior to that she completed the BPhil at Oxford and the MSci in Physics and Philosophy at Bristol. Twitter: @philophyser

Michael Townsen Hicks joined FraMEPhys as a Research Fellow in September 2019. He is mostly interested in the ways we use scientific laws and models to understand what’s possible, and what isn’t. Previously he was a wissenschaftlicher mitarbeiter at the Universität zu Köln in Cologne, Germany, and a research fellow on the Consolidation of Fine-Tuning project at the University of Oxford. He did his PhD thesis under Barry Loewer at Rutgers University.

Noelia Iranzo Ribera is a PhD researcher within the FraMEPhys project at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Birmingham. She holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Barcelona, and a MSc in History and Philosophy of Science from Utrecht University. She is mainly interested in the ways we use scientific models to reason, represent and explain the world. Her thesis explores a series of issues concerning modality, causation, and scientific representation in connection with the interventionist theory of causation. Twitter: @niranzri

Nicholas Emmerson is a PhD researcher within the FraMEPhys project at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Birmingham. He joined in July 2020 after completing a BA and MA at the University of Kent, the MPhil at the University of Cambridge and a year of PhD study at King’s, London. He is interested in the metaphysics of grounding and the philosophy of scientific progress. Twitter: @nich_emm

Francis Longworth is the Project Administrator for the FraMEPhys project, having joined in January 2020; he is also a Research Associate with the project. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ohio University. He did his PhD on causation at the University of Pittsburgh and was a graduate affiliate at MIT. Francis also works in the Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Birmingham, where his interests are causal modelling and Bayesianism as they relate to the methodology of clinical trials. 

Zee R. Perry is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and a Research Associate with the FraMEPhys project. Zee works primarily at the intersections of metaphysics and the philosophy of physics; her project at Birmingham is called SQuaRed-Ex: Scientific Quantitativeness Reduced and (Metaphysically) Explained. Zee received a PhD in Philosophy from New York University and has subsequently held posts at Rutgers, CU Boulder, and NYU Shanghai.

Vera Matarese is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy of science at the University of Bern, Switzerland and was a Visiting Fellow within the FraMEPhys project during September-October 2022. Previously, she was a visiting fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and a postdoctoral researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences.  At the heart of her research lie issues in the metaphysics of science and in the philosophy of physics; specifically, her research focuses on the metaphysics of the quantum state. Vera has also research projects in the methodology of science, in particular on scientific replicability and on epistemological issues arising in the field of astrophysics. 

Dan Marshall is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University and was a Visiting Fellow within the FraMEPhys project during June 2019. He and works in metaphysics and in related areas in logic and the philosophy of science; during his visit to FraMEPhys he worked on explanation, facts and grounding and presented at a project seminar and workshop.

Jean Baynham is a Visiting Artist with the FraMEPhys project. Her work focuses on the investigation of patterns, from the everyday world to the natural world to the unseen world of the microscopic. She looks for the relationships between these patterns to understand the meaning of our reality. Her investigations have led her to areas such as fractals, feedback loops, cymatics, (the visualisation of sound) and geometry, and more recently her focus has turned to digital physics and the possibility that we are living in a virtual world. 

John Barnden is Professor Emeritus of AI at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, and a Research Associate with the FraMEPhys project. His primary work relevant to the project is on the metaphysics and physics of consciousness (whether in artefacts or natural systems), with leanings towards both process philosophy and neo-phenomenology. It also brings in the nature of time and of causation. His other main recent work, in AI and Cognitive Science more generally, has been on the nature and processing of figurative language, particularly metaphor. This work has largely been separate from his work in consciousness, but one confluence has been the role of metaphoricality in some conscious phenomenality.

Joaquim Giannotti is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham and joined FraMEPhys as a Research Associate in September 2020. He works in metaphysics and metaphysical areas of the philosophy of science. Joaquim is currently articulating a novel theory of grounding that can capture non-asymmetrical dependencies such as those displayed by quantum entangled components. He is also interested in how we should think of the fundamental in a way which is both illuminating and befitting of our best science. Before coming to Birmingham, Joaquim did his PhD on the metaphysics of fundamental properties and the ontology of powers at Glasgow. Twitter: @nothumean

Aaron Sloman is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham and a Research Associate with the FraMEPhys project. He was awarded the APA’s Barwise Prize in 2020 for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing. Since switching from mathematics to philosophy as a graduate student in 1959 he has been attempting to explain what’s true in Kant’s analysis of mathematical knowledge: locating mathematical discovery in an ever broader and deeper biological context, originating with ancient chemistry-based information-processing shared with many species, but continually enriched and diversified through multiple evolutionary transitions using increasingly sophisticated evolved construction-kits for building both physical components and control-systems for using them. As part of FraMEPhys he has been exploring links between this project and the metaphysics of grounding and causation. Twitter: @aaronsloman

Konner Childers is a PhD Research Associate with the FraMEPhys project at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Birmingham, supervised by Alastair Wilson and Katie Robertson. He is interested in gauge/gravity and S-duality, as well as formal problems in quantum field theory. Twitter: @weylperson

John Murphy is a PhD Research Associate with the FraMEPhys project and is working on a PhD at the University of Birmingham, supervised by Alastair Wilson, Katie Robertson and Michael Hicks. He works on Everettian quantum theory, currently focusing on attempts to explain the Born Rule.

Josh Quirke is a PhD Research Associate with the FraMEPhys project and is working on a PhD at the University of Birmingham, supervised by Alastair Wilson, Katie Robertson and Michael Hicks. He works primarily on the nature of perspectives and their role in understanding physical theories.