Cogut Institute for the Humanities

David Frank was a fall 2020–spring 2022 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. His research focuses on values and ethics in environmental sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Texas in 2012 with a dissertation on the philosophy of conservation biology. He has since held postdoctoral positions at New York University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Tennessee, developing research collaborations with environmental scientists and teaching courses on environmental ethics, research ethics, and philosophy of science. His current research focuses on philosophical controversies about invasive species, the ethics and economics of the Green New Deal, and the ethics of environmental health research.

In 2021–2022, he published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science a paper titled “What Is the Environment in Environmental Health Research? Perspectives from the Ethics of Science,” which he had presented to the Fellows Seminar in spring ’21. He also published the paper “Science and Values in the Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function Debate” in the Biology and Philosophy and a review of the Routledge Handbook of Biosecurity and Invasive Species in Biological Invasions. His gave a talk on the concept “Cooperation” at the spring Political Concepts Conference at the institute, as well as talks at Queens College–CUNY, Wellesley College, Durham University, and MIT.

Read an interview about his research in The Humanities in Practice.