I grew up in one of the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah. My mother worked as a piecemeal seamstress, my father worked driving locomotive and painting military camouflage (yes, that's two 40hr weeks , plus overtime). I read a lot of books, tossed a lot of boxes out of trailers, and spent a bit of time building railroad. Eventually, after bouncing around the US for a number of years, I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I then spent two years as a post-doc in the department of psychology at the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard University; I also spent one concurrent year as a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University (I figured that my father had held two jobs at once, I might as well too). Since the fall of 2009, I have been an Assistant Professor in the department of philosophy at Georgetown University.

My research is interdisciplinary (perhaps to the extreme) and I tend to publish work in philosophical as well as psychological venues. My research focuses on a pair of core issues: moral psychology and the (ruthlessly naturalized) metaphysics of mind.

I have carried out a number of empirical studies on the cognitive strategies that people employ in making moral judgments, and I hope to eventually play a role in uncovering the computational principles that are at play in the production of said moral judgments. To further this research, I am also currently engaged in a number of collaborative research projects targeting the deficits in moral cognition that are exhibited by patient populations and incarcerated psychopaths. My hope is that a clearer understanding of the failures in the capacity to make and act on moral judgments can shed light on the operation of a typically functioning moral mind.

I am also carrying out more theoretical research on the architecture of the mind. Specifically, I am interested in the extent to which genuinely cognitive capacities can extend beyond the bounds of skin and skull. Are the people and objects in our environment scaffolding for the production of our mental states? Or, more intriguingly, do groups of people and their technological environment sometimes constitute extended cognitive systems? I tend to think that the more intriguing claim is likely to be true and I am currently in the process of writing a book manuscript in which I argue that the tools of the cognitive sciences can be brought to bear on the the purposeful behavior of groups--in some cases demonstrating that groups have minds in precisely the same sense that individuals do!