Here’s a list of courses I’ve taught, along with a little bit on what they were about and what was focused on (syllabi and course evaluations available by request).

University of Pittsburgh

  • Medicine & Morality (Fall 2022)

    • This course is a core requirement for students pursuing a certificate in the conceptual foundations of medicine. It focuses on ethical dilemmas in health care practices, including shared decision making, autonomy and informed consent, abortion, conscientious objection, gender bias in research, private industry and conflicts of interest, artificial intelligence and ‘big data’ in medicine, equity, trust, and the role of patients in clinical research.

  • Mind & Medicine (Spring 2023)

    • This is also a requirement for the certificate in conceptual foundations of medicine, and discusses fundamental philosophical issues with the nature of mental health, mental health research, and treatment. Topics ranged from defining health and disease, the biopsychosocial model of health, highlighting issues with psychiatric classification, anti-psychiatry, tensions between psychiatry and evidence-based medicine, the placebo effect, disease mongering, adverse events in talk-therapy, and the role of mobile technology and mental health.

University of Toronto

  • History and Philosophy of Science 300: Philosophy of Therapeutic Drugs (Summer 2021)

    • This online course focused on the various issues that arise in the development, trial processes, and clinical use of pharmaceutical drugs. By looking at the ‘life-cycle’ of a brand-new drug, students learned about extrapolation between animal and human models, research trial design issues around validity, how precautionary reasoning influences (or sometimes fails to influence) policy making, how to we discover side effects in clinical practice, clinical ethics guidelines, and vaccine hesitancy.

San Francisco State University

  • Philosophy 110: Critical Thinking (Spring 2016, Spring 2017)

    • In these courses I focused primarily on formal logic, but also discussed informal fallacies, argument analysis, and ethical reasoning. We also discussed real-world examples about science and media, highlighting intersectionality and how to engage in productive, problem-solving conversations.

  • Philosophy/Political Science 150: Contemporary Moral and Political Issues (Fall 2016)

    • In this course I focused on familiarizing students with standard ethical theories like utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. From there we addressed a range of issues including euthanasia, animal rights, environmental ethics, free speech, biotechnology, and gender, racial, and economic justice.

  • Philosophy 350: Philosophy of Science (Spring 2021)

    • Synchronous/asynchronous hybrid. In this course I focused on classic conversations and topics in the philosophy of science including demarcation, underdetermination, paradigms, laws of nature, explanation, realism and anti-realism, and how value judgements underlie risk and uncertainty in scientific practice. Weekly asynchronous activities usually involved looking at a case study in the history of science and applying lessons from weekly reading or lecture. Case studies included Barry Marshal’s discovery of the link between H. Pylori and ulcers, the origins of chemotherapy in World War One, the Michaelson-Morley experiment, the OxyContin crisis, LIGO, and advances in AI diagnosis in radiology among others.