WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE
My name is Brian. I'm a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and bioethicist. I'm currently an Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics and, by courtesy, of Philosophy and of Psychology at the National University of Singapore (NUS) as well as 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.
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 & Society at the University of Oxford and NUS, as well as HOPE: The Hub at Oxford for Psychedelic Ethics, an international collaboration with Dr. David Yaden, the Roland R. Griffiths Professor of Psychedelic Research at Johns Hopkins University. I'm also the 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).
My next books are Private: The Right to Genital Autonomy (Chicago University Press, under contract) and, with Katerina Jennings, 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).