I am a philosopher and cognitive scientist, and currently finishing up my PhD at the University of Lisbon. Most recently, I carried out a fellowship at Ruhr University Bochum on agential thinking in biological and artificial agents. My work lies at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, biology, and AI, with a focus on the concept of agency and how it can be studied across diverse systems, from unicellular organisms to humans and artificial agents. In particular, I am interested in the diversity of agenthood, and how various functions of agency can be organised and constrained in different ways to support adaptive behaviour. To address this question, I combine the paradigm of reinforcement learning (RL) with comparative methods, where I aim to clarify the role of modelling assumptions in the science of agency and to better understand phylogenetic variation in agential behaviour.

During my writing-up fellowship, I aim to critically assess the core assumptions of RL approaches to agency, and their compatibility with a constraint-sensitive account of agency. This allows me to critically assess the operational scope and ecological validity of RL-based accounts, and some of the strengths and limitations of RL as a model for thinking about agency more generally. Outside of my research, I am passionate about supporting grass-roots movements and more diverse research communities in academia. External to my PhD, I am a co-founder and associate researcher at Non-neural cognition research (NnCR), a member of the PPI group for Interoception and Mental Health (University of Surrey), and programme chair for the International Society of the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM).