WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE
My name is Brian. I'm a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and bioethicist. I'm currently Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics and, by courtesy, Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Psychology at the National University of Singapore (NUS). I am also a member of the Artificial Intelligence Institute of NUS and a Research Affiliate of the Uehiro Oxford Institute of the University of Oxford. I'm proud to be an elected member of the UK Young Academy under the auspices of the British Academy and the Royal Society.
With Lucy Frith and Arianne Shahvisi, I am co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, published by the BMJ, and Editor-in-Chief of its new companion journal, JME Practical Bioethics.
I work on relational moral psychology, philosophy of technology; research ethics, reproducibility, and open science; ethics of AI and human enhancement; philosophy of love, sex and gender; bodily autonomy and integrity, and children's rights, among other areas. I helped to establish "experimental philosophical bioethics" as an area of research.
I direct the Oxford-NUS Centre for Neuroethics and Society at the University of Oxford and NUS, and the EARP Lab (Experimental Bioethics, Artificial Intelligence, and Relational Moral Psychology Lab) at NUS. I'm also Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center.
My undergraduate degree was in cognitive science with a philosophy concentration, from Yale University (2010), followed by a master's degree in psychological research methods from the University of Oxford (2011) and a second master's in the history and philosophy of science and medicine from the University of Cambridge (2014). My Ph.D. is in philosophy and psychology from Yale (2021).
My first book is Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020, with Julian Savulescu), available in the UK as Love Is the Drug: The Chemical Future of Our Relationships (Manchester University Press, 2020). It was selected as an Editor's Choice by Scientific American and reviewed favorably in the popular press (e.g., The Atlantic) and in academic journals (e.g., AJOB, Journal of Moral Philosophy).
My next books are Private: The Right to Genital Autonomy (University of Chicago Press, under contract), Me, Myself, & AI (MIT Press, under contract) and a book on gender ethics for Polity Press (under contract).
With Clare Chambers and Lori Watson, I am editor of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality (Routledge, 2022).