Hi! My name is Danielle. I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, sharing time in both the Philosophy department and the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department. I earned my PhD in Philosophy at the University of California at Davis in 2023. My dissertation offers a unified account of physical computation that defines three questions about physical computation and how those questions work together to generate a full understanding of what it means for a physical system (especially biological) to perform computations. 

 

I specialize in philosophy of mind, neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI. My research explores the relationship between various types of explanation and modeling strategies in the brain sciences and AI. A reoccurring theme in my work is the use of computation to both model and understand neural processes and what kind of explanation computational descriptions constitute, what they can tell us about biological processes across contexts, and whether the success of computational models warrants ascribing computations to the systems they describe. 

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Additionally, I am interested in the histories of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and AI and how their history can shed light on the interconnected role of computation within each field, what the shared assumptions are and how they differ. This includes the connection between the early brain sciences and philosophy of mind. 

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My research takes approaches found within the general philosophy of science and the history of science, engaging debates such as the nature of physical computation, realism, the nature of explanation, and the role of idealization and abstraction in modeling practices. 

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