My research spans Interdisciplinary and Applied Philosophy, Foresight, and Existential Risk Studies.

Since obtaining my PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics I have worked primarilly at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute (2015-16) and Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (2016-25). My research combines my expertise in philosophy with my experience of foresight to explore and interpret large scale societal, technological, and environmental transformations and the risk they pose for humanity. My primary research contributions fall into four groups.

​Firstly, I have contributed to our understanding of the ethics of future generations and human extinction, an extension of my PhD research. Much of this has been in collaboration with my colleague Patrick Kaczmarek. Across two papers (in Utilitas and Argumenta) and two book chapters, we developed social contract based arguments agains human extinction: looking at our obligations to past and present people, to future generations themselves, and to humanity as a whole. We offer this as an alternative to dominant ethical paradigms for thinking about human extinction that draw primarily on the utilitarian tradition. Dr Kaczmarek and I have also published papers arguing in favour of a positive time preference for wellbeing, known as social discounting, and that we should give priority to preventing near term disasters than seeking to alter the long-term trajectory of humanity (in The Monist) and exploring the Derek Parfit's Theory X.

​Secondly, I have produced foundational work in developing the norms and theories within transdisciplinary Existential Risk Studies. With Emile Torres I wrote the first academic history of the field's development; arguing that it has experienced three waves of research, each building on the last while broadening its scope of perspectives and approaches. With Tom Rowe and James Fox, I surveyed and evaluated the methods currently used in the field and called for greater rigour and reflexiveness in their application, even when evidence is limited and issues are urgent. With Lalitha Sundaram and Matthijs Maas, I considered seven contemporary challenges facing the field, and different proposals for addressing them. With Suzy Levy, I conducted a series of interviews and wrote a report on how to improve diversity and inclusion across the existential risk community. Finally, I led a study with 13 co-authors using ParEvo, a narrative foresight tool, to explore possible futures for the field. Drawing on these studies I have co-edited two books on Existential Risk Studies published by Open Book: a The Era of Global Risk: An introduction to Existential Risk Studies (with Martin Rees, Catherine Richards, and Clarissa Rios-Rojas) and An Anthology of Global Risk (with Tom Hobson).

​Thirdly, I have researched contributors to existential risk, focussing primarily on systemic and complex drivers of risk. This has included writing Double Debt Disaster, a short book with Julius Weitzdorfer on the 3/11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear mega disaster in Japan (for Iudicum); co-editing, with Partha Dasgupta and Natalie Jones, a special section in the journal Development Studies on global population change; coordinating an interdisciplinary study on assessing climate changes contribution to existential risk (in Futures); and contributing to a groundbreaking report on the Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence. My most significant contribution to our understanding of risk across these projects has been developing ways to study global and extreme risk holistically (rather than partitioning it into individual 'risks') and to consider vulnerabilities and exposures alongside hazards, especially when thinking about the most viable policy options for risk mitigation and management.

​Finally, I have developed and applied novel foresight tools, including working as an editorial board member of the journal Futures. With Rick Davies, Lara Mani, and Tom Hobson I helped to develop the ParEvo participatory futures tool ,and published a paper (in Evaluation) and book chapter on it's application to risk research, while my study into possible futures for the Science of Global Risk was the first academic write up of a ParEvo exercise to be published in a peer reviewed journal. This tool allows for more creative and diverse perspectives on possible futures to be synthesised and has been developed with an ethnographic approach that makes it well suited to using with a wide variety of stakeholders. In addition to this I have also been a collaborator on foresight exercises using modified versions of the Delphi technique that focused on food security, climate change, and public health.

​The multifactored nature of my work to date reflects both the breadth of my interests and my desire to work collaboratively across many projects. I started out doing ethics, but the more I thought about how to respond to some of the difficult choices we face the more I realized that we didn't properly understand them yet, and that we needed new tools for doing so.

My Google scholar profile is here.

Group portrait for the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in September 2024