Hello!
I’m Austin, a philosopher of science primarily focusing on medicine and biomedical ethics. From 2024-2025 I was a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), and from 2025-2026 I am a Professor of Practice at ETSU. My work focuses on epistemic, social, and ethical issues with contemporary medical practice and research with an emphasis on the development, regulation, use, and consequences of medical interventions like pharmaceutical drugs.
I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2022 where my doctoral work examined how we define and discover pharmaceutical side effects. I argue for a novel, patient-relative account of ‘side effect’ (published and available here) that cleanly differentiates it from other clinical outcomes like ‘adverse events’ and placebo effects, as well as fixes issues in definitions given by health authorities like the CDC, WHO, and FDA. I also highlighted how post-market ‘phase 4’ trials complicate philosophical accounts of ‘exploration’ in science (published and available here), and that commitments to core tenets of ‘evidence-based’ medicine are partially at fault for our lack of knowledge about side effects (published and available here). Finally, I offered a bioethical framework for patient involvement in the side effect discovery process (published and available here).
My ongoing research continues to look at side effects but also branches into conceptual and ethical issues with psychiatry, genomic medicine, patient and public inclusion in science and medicine or ‘citizen science’, agriculture and regulating novel technology, conflicts of interest and privatized science, and the role of values in science. I’ve recently published on patient empowerment in ‘precision’ medicine initiatives (pre-print here), the ‘nocebo’ effect in ‘active’ pharmacovigilance research directed specifically at health service researchers (pre-print here), and on ‘symptom bias,’ a kind of bias I argue can negatively influence medical decision making (pre-print here). I am fundamentally committed to a practice-informed, problem-centric approach to social, ethical, and epistemic issues in contemporary medicine.
You can reach me at: austinjdue@gmail.com or duea01@etsu.edu