I had the honor of serving as President of the Faculty for four years and have spent almost 10 years representing CSUN and the CSU faculty on the Academic Senate of the CSU. In addition to tussling with Chancellors and keeping things orderly as the ASCSU's Parliamentarian, I've spent the last year on the ASCSU Executive Committee and have been deeply engaged in resisting legislative intrusion into the curriculum, especially around transfers and GE. Through all this I keep my sanity through all of this by teaching classes in ethics and mentoring students on a wide range of interdisciplinary projects.

I also maintain a significant research agenda. As a philosopher, I work mostly on philosophical and ethical issues related to pain and pain medicine. With my interdisciplinary research group at the USC Pain Center, I have active projects exploring, inter alia, factors affecting trust between chronic pain patients and clinicians, the clinical utility of genetic markers for pain sensitivity and liability to addiction, patterns in pain patient Twitter use, and the use of artificial intelligence tools in screening chronic pain patients for psychosocial comorbidities.

I'm also starting to work on ethical issues concerning personal data privacy, machine learning/ data analytics, and information security.

Whenever there is any time left over, I write software to help myself teach better.

  • Ph.D. Philosophy 2006, Rutgers University
  • B.A. Philosophy 1999, University of California, Los Angeles

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