I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. My primary supervisor is Ali Boyle. I work on her intriguing project “Episodic Memory: Uniquely Human?”. My secondary supervisor is Jonathan Birch who runs the amazing “Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience”.

Since my undergraduate, I work on questions about the nature of our mental states. Particularly, our ability to consciously remember particular past experiences. My work stretches over the philosophy of mind (including animal minds), philosophy of biology and animal ethics.

In my PhD thesis, I explore the nature and function of our ability to episodically remember. I am interested in why we have episodic memory which leads me to investigate what the benefits of episodic memory are that led to its evolution. If it evolved in humans, this means it is probably shared with some other animals with whom we share an evolutionary past. I am fascinated by studies on nonhuman animals that show behaviours indicative of an ability to remember their past. In my thesis, I explore what this capacity is like, for example, whether it produces conscious mental states (rather than making information available unconsciously). Cognitive capacities, like episodic memory, possessed by nonhuman animals can have moral implications pertaining to how we should treat them. I explore why this is so and what these could be.