I started my long-delayed doctoral studies in October 2005, having decided that I had been with Peace Corps Washington as a technical support specialist for long enough and it was time to move on. I had lived in the UK and attended the University of Sussex twice previously, in 1984-1985 (as an undergraduate exchange student from Northwestern University) and in 1989-1992 (as an MSc student, followed by a two-year research assistantship at the University of Manchester).
I've had pretty much a life-long interest in writing and language, which developed into an interest in the concepts underlying language, which led me into ideas about how we could create computer models of those conceptual structures, which resulted in my present home in philosophy of mind, from whence I hope to make my way back into cognitive science proper.
I submitted my thesis in late September 2010 and successfully defended it 16 March 2011. I was asked to make half a dozen minor corrections; these were approved on 18 May 2011. Since then I have had various short-term appointments and been looking actively for a "permanent" position.
I am an active member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) and a past speaker at conferences of both the ASSC (Buenos Aires 2016) and Toward a Science of Consciousness (Helsinki 2015, Stockholm 2011, Budapest 2007).
I am an active member in the UK-based Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. I have sat on their board for a total of seven years, first as editor of the AISB Quarterly and, more recently, as secretary. Over the course of the past fifteen years I organized or helped organize nearly a dozen symposia at their annual convention on the topics of mental health, the cognitive (neuro)science of depression, computational models of emotion and, most recently (July 2026), the continued relevance (if any) of the Turing test, and the nature of free will in the age of AI.
I am past managing editor of the Journal for Intercultural Communication (2020-2022) and the Journal of Cognitive Semiotics (2011-2013). I am a frequent reviewer for journals including WIREs Cognitive Science, AI and Society, Transactions on Affective Computing (where I was one of the guest editors of a special issue in 2021 on computational modeling of emotion) and Philosophical Psychology. I assist colleagues with preparation of their manuscripts for submission and publication. I am perhaps most well-known within the machine consciousness and ethics of technology communities. My most widely read (nearly 15,000 reads on ResearchGate) and cited (96) first-authored paper "What makes any agent a moral agent? Reflections on machine consciousness and moral agency" lies at the intersection of these two fields.
Over the course of my academic career, I have been an active member of two research groups: the Philosophy of AI in Cognitive Science group at Sussex, University, UK, while I was doing my doctoral studies, and the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University, Sweden, during my first postdoctoral years. I was also affiliated for a time with Sussex University’s Centre for Cognitive Science, whose seminar series I ran.
I currently have one paper under review (on the relationship between facts, narrative, and evidence) and am preparing another for submission (on using contemporary debates within ethics of technology to raise the bar on "acceptable" human behavior). I am also preparing a journal special-issue proposal based on the 2026 AISB symposium Varieties of free will and agency.
[resume / CV (English)]
