Welcome new postdocs!
Please join us in welcoming postdoctoral fellows Matilde Carrera and Andrew Bollhagen to the MCPS community. We're excited to have them here!
About Matilde
Matilde's research examines how scientists produce and evaluate evidence about human populations and demographic change over our evolutionary history. Her case studies span ancient DNA, population genetics, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction, where she looks at how scientists reach conclusions about human diversity, migration, and climate resilience despite limited data and research unfolds in complex ethical scenarios. Her current project at the Center explores how ethics and epistemology intersect in ancient DNA research, asking whether following ethical guidelines is enough for responsible research and how these best practices shape what counts as evidence. She received her PhD in philosophy from Boston University, where she was a member of Alisa Bokulich's Phi-Geo research group, and she collaborates on Celso Neto's HUGERA project.
About Andrew
The problems that the living world (including the human social world) confronts us with--problems of purpose, teleology, directionality, function, agency, organization, and mechanism--are intellectually complex problems. By “complex” I mean what philosopher William Wimsatt would call a "thicket." An understanding of the living world as complex in the “thickety” sense implies, as I see it, that the intellectually complex problems we face are, almost by definition, not solvable by intellectual means (abstraction, idealization, reduction). So, by what means do we solve intellectually complex problems, if not by intellectual means? The short answer is: by organizational means. We organize. We build community. Developing the long answer is a primary aim of mine as a postdoctoral researcher at MCPS.
I am currently pursuing this goal by developing a Wimsattian view on "perspectives" as both a contribution to the perspectivist literature in philosophy of science and as a means of facilitating interdisciplinary inquiry in the life sciences. Relatedly, I am working on projects aimed at synthesizing the theory of biological autonomy, which offers an account of the causal organization of whole organisms, and mechanist philosophy of science, which focuses on the investigative practices and explanations scientists produce to explain particular biological phenomena (glycolosis, axonal transport, muscle contraction etc.). The wider aim here is to offer tools for rethinking the traditional tension between the holist and reductionist tendencies running through the history of biology. Finally, I look forward to continuing the sociological study of scientific work organization that I began in my previous postdoctoral project, the Sociology of the Purpose Project, which studied from both philosophical and sociological perspectives, the Templeton-funded Agency, Directionality, and Function project.
