Work

From September, 2020-June, 2022, I was a predoctoral fellow in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health:

• I spent most of my time working with Joseph Millum and thinking about the relationship between population ethics, reproductive healthcare, and priority-setting. I presented “How *not* to count the health benefits of family planning” at the Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities’ (IBHH) Reproductive Ethics Conference back in April of 2021, and I presented a follow-up at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’ annual conference in October of the same year. The paper that grew out of those presentations was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in December of 2021. You can read a short summary of the paper here. Joe and I are now working on the next leg of our research project, which explores how *to* count the health benefits of family planning.
• I’m also working on a survey project with Mariam Noorulhuda, Sarah Raskoff, and Marion Danis that is primarily designed to capture the current state of American bioethics departments and research centers’ efforts to address racism. The project grew out of an informal survey we conducted in 2021 to inform the NIH Department of Bioethics’ efforts. We are interested in practices that bioethics departments and research centers have control over that may have a more direct and immediately positive effect on health outcomes for patients of color (e.g., making changes to bioethics consultation services to ensure that they adequately account for race). But we are also interested in if and how bioethics departments and research centers are thinking about and engaging in more public-facing work. In our initial survey, we were pleasantly surprised to find that there are some bioethics departments and research centers involved in advocacy efforts aimed at structural change (e.g., one department is involved in local lobbying efforts to limit police powers).  
• I reviewed The God Committee with Kailyn Price for Justice Everywhere. We didn’t like how the movie portrayed the ethics of organ allocation and xenotransplantation. You can read a brief summary of the blog post here. 
• I spent a year as the Department’s *official* Tea Tsar. That mostly involved organizing our virtual teatimes: a weekly gathering centered around a theme or activity of the rotating host’s choosing—everything from “Guess whose refrigerator this is based on its content!” to a discussion about mental sanctuaries. Several playlists were generated from those gatherings; they can be found here.

During my senior year at the Elliott School of International Affairs, I worked as a teaching assistant and peer mentor. I co-taught a course for first-year students on professional development, academic preparedness, and ethics.

Before that, I devoted eight months to working as a researcher and ethicist for ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company. Here’s some more information about that experience:

• I spent around 60% of my time as lead researcher on the D.C. Lab’s public finance project. Our team worked on using blockchain technology to improve access to and efficiency within the municipal bond market.
• I spent around 30% of my time working on ethics issues. My biggest accomplishment was convincing our Solutions team to adopt a more ethical and risk-conscious business selection framework.
• I spent the remainder of my time writing about the world of blockchain for internal and external audiences. Check out my article on the moral dilemma posed by the presence of “death pools” on Augur, a decentralized prediction market protocol.

Earlier in my college career, I worked as an ethics intern for Lockheed Martin Corporation at their corporate headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. I revamped their Gift Decision Tree and investigated the integration status of nearly 200 legal entities into their corporate ethics program. Though that experience was valuable, I have no intention of doing further work for the armaments industry.

I’ve also worked as a research intern for the Hudson Institute, an overnight camp counselor for North Star Camp for Boys, and a sales associate for Uncle Dan’s Outfitters.