I am the Director of Research of the Centre for Philosophy of AI Research {PAIR} at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where I coordinate the research activities of PAIR and work as a philosopher with a focus on the philosophy of mind at its intersections with epistemology, neuroscience, and engineering. Currently, my main focus is on epistemic risks of interacting with and in engineered environments, philosophical issues of psychedelics in psychotherapy, structural approaches to consciousness, and ontologies of pain. Besides this, I have written on neural correlates of consciousness, the limits of introspection, paradoxes in the sciences, and more (see my Google scholar page here; most of my work can be found online as open access).

Before coming to PAIR, I was the Juniorprofessor for Neurophilosophy at the philosophy department at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. I am still a member of the Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences at Magdeburg.

I like working collaboratively and have benefitted greatly from interactions with researchers of various backgrounds. Currently, I am involved as a principal investigator in the DFG/AHRC-funded project SENSOR “Sensory Engineering: Investigating Altered and Guided Perception and Hallucination” (with the Center for the Study of Perceptual Experiences at the University of Glasgow); the BMBF/DLR-funded project „PsychedELSI: Ethische, legale und soziale Implikationen der Neuropsychopharmakologie in der Psychotherapie – Vorbereitung auf die psychedelische Renaissance“; and the two Taiwanese-German projects, funded by EU ERANET NEURON, PSYTRANS (on psychedelic transformation) and COMPAIN (on complex pain ontologies). Previously, I have been a PI in the DFG-funded research training group Extrospection: External Acces to Higher Cognitive Processes (2019–2023).

Wanja Wiese, Jennifer Windt, and I founded the independent, cost-free, diamond open-access journal Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, where I still serve as one of the Editors-in-Chief. We aim to provide a sustainable alternative to for-profit publishing. Funding by the DFG now allows us to develop this model further, making it scalable and transferable, and sharing our tools open source with other journals. We thereby want to support the strong trend toward sustainable open access.

Any society can benefit from philosophical reflection. To increase the reach of academic philosophy, I have produced several interviews with German analytic philosophers for the Youtube channel of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP). Thomas Grundmann and I initiated this channel in 2017.