Dr. Gunnar Babcock, PhD ’20

I graduated from UAlbany with Ph.D. in December 2020, specializing in philosophy of biology and philosophy of science.

I just finished up a postdoc in the Biology Department at Duke University and I’m starting in a faculty position as a lecturer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. At the moment, I’m looking forward to being part of a large, interdisciplinary meeting that’s taking place at the Carnegie Institute of Science in Washington D.C. and is led by minerologist Robert Hazen. The meeting is all about looking for new laws of nature and thinking about directional trends in how the universe is organized.

Some classes that standout during my time at UAlbany were Monika Piotrowska’s “Human Nature”, Nate Powers’ course on Lucretius’ “On Nature of Things” and also TAing for Ron McClamrock’s “Mind and the World”. All of these courses really made me stop and think about our scientific knowledge, particularly when it comes to biology. What I learned in them has been indispensable in the work I’ve gone on to do in biology departments.

I really value the graduate work I did while in the PhD program at UAlbany. The way the program is setup, and the diverse expertise of the department’s faculty exposed me to lot of different areas of philosophy. I think this exposure has been key to a lot of my subsequent ideas for research. It has helped me see connections between different areas of philosophy, which I think hyper-specialization can sometimes lead people to miss. For example, my first publication came about from applying classic arguments about identity to cases of symmetry in microbiological fission. Faculty members, like P.D. Magnus, not only embraced this seemingly strange line of thought, but helped me hone my reasoning to make compelling arguments for it.