Education: B.A., Yale University; Ph.D., Princeton University; D.Phil., Freie Universität Berlin

ORCID: 0000-0001-9510-6147

Honors

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• Patterson-Banister Endowed Chair, College of Liberal Arts, UT Austin
• Robert Conklin Faculty Fellow, Plan II Honors Program
• International Lecturer in Bioethics, Hasanuddin University, Indonesia
• 2023 Visiting Researcher, Centre for Bioethics, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia
• 2022 Visiting Researcher, Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National Univ. of Singapore
• 2021–22 Fulbright Distinguished Chair, Lund University, Sweden

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Sole-Authored Books

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• Indigeneity as Social Construct and Political Tool (2025, forthcoming) – De Gruyter
• Creating Human Nature: Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering (2022) – Cambridge UP
• The Human Rights State (2016) – University of Pennsylvania Press
• Human Rights as Social Construction (2012) – Cambridge UP
• Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (2003) – Duke UP
• Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (2003; 2nd ed. 2012) – SUNY Press

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Recent Peer-Reviewed Articles & Book Chapters

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2025 / forthcoming 2026

• The Human Genome as Knowledge Commons, in Governing Corporate Knowledge Commons (Cambridge UP)
• Political Bioethics: Procedural Decision-Making in the Public Sphere, in Handbook Theoretical Bioethics (Elgar)
• Climate-Responsive Clinical Practice, AJOB
• Humanity’s Moral Burden: As AI Advances, Responsibility Escalates, in Palgrave Handbook on the Ethics of AI
• Human Death as Biological Reality and Social Construct, American Journal of Bioethics

2024

• Human Genetic Engineering, in Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, 2nd ed.
• Bioethics Should Not Seek to Reflect Public Opinion, American Journal of Bioethics 24(9)
• How to Evaluate an Individual's Decision Whether to Vaccinate, AJOB 24(7)
• Vitoria’s Cosmopolitan Potential Realized via Social Construction, Not Natural Law, Deusto Journal of Human Rights 13
• Liberalizing Effect in Authoritarian Societies of Bioethical Principle of Decisional Autonomy? Politics & Life Sciences

2023

• AI-Based Solutions Can Threaten Physicians' Ethical Obligations Only If Allowed to Do So, AJOB 23(9)
• Genetic Engineering Revolution, in Handbook of the Anthropocene
• Imperfect Methods for Imperfect Democracies, American Journal of Bioethics 23(7)
• Artificial Consciousness Unlikely to Possess a Moral Capacity, AJOB Neuroscience 14(2)

2022

• Person- vs. Identity-Affecting Distinctions Between Forms of Human Germline Editing, AJOB 22(9)
• Political Bioethics, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47(4)
• Regulating Genetic Engineering Guided by Human Dignity, Not Genetic Essentialism, Politics & the Life Sciences 41(1)
• Parameters of Possible Constitutional Interpretation, in Vocabularies of Public Life (Routledge)

2021

• Right to Privacy vs. Right to Public Health in COVID-19 (in Portuguese), Lessico di etica pubblica
• Against Essentialism in Conceptions of Human Rights and Human Nature, Human Rights Quarterly 43
• Human Rights Require Yet Contest National Sovereignty, in Sovereignty as Value
• How to Oppose Authoritarian Democracy in Brazil, Latin American Human Rights Studies
• Beyond Due Diligence: The Human Rights Corporation, Human Rights Review 22

2020

• On the Use and Abuse of Biotechnology (in German), in Optimierung des Menschen
• The Human Rights State, in The State of Human Rights (Winter Verlag)
• Construção Social de uma Natureza Humana (in Portuguese), Boletim Goiano de Geografia
• The Indigenous Rights State, Ratio Juris 33(1)

2018–2019

• Against a Human Right to Self-Isolation for Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights Review 20(3)
• Indigeneity as Social Construct and Political Tool, Human Rights Quarterly 41(4)
• Reading for Justice in Current Developments in Genetics, Politics and the Life Sciences 37(2)
• The Coming Political Challenges of AI, Digital Culture & Society 4(1)
• Human Genetic Engineering: Biotic Justice in the Anthropocene? in Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, vol. 4

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Selected Invited Talks 2023–2025

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• Oct 2025 – Universitas Paramadina (Java): “Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence, Human Genetic Engineering”
• Sep 2025 - Universitas Hasanuddin (Sulawesi): "Bioethics Across Legal Cultures: Toward an Integrated Jurisprudence"
• Jun 2025 – North Eastern Hill University (Meghalaya, India): “The Role of Bioethics in Law and Legal Education”
• Nov 2024 – Utrecht University (Netherlands): “Regulating Human Genetic Engineering: A Procedural Pathway”
• Oct 2024 – Academia Sinica (Shenzhen, China): “Synthetic Cell Research and Application: Bioethical Challenges”
• Jun 2024 – Mizoram University & National Law University Guwahati (both India): “Indigeneity as Social Construct”
• Feb 2024 – King’s College London: "Human Genome as Knowledge Commons: Mutual-Benefit Democracy"
• Nov 2023 – University of Macau (China): “Individual Privacy vs. Public Health under Pandemic Conditions”
• Sept 2023 – UT Austin: “Should We Genetically Modify Future Persons?”
• Jun 2023 – Thirteen universities across Indonesia: lecture series on political bioethics
• Apr 2023 – University of Augsburg (Germany): “Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering”

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Selected Invited Book Reviews 2020–2025

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• 2025 — America's Military Biomedical Complex: Law, Ethics, & Drive for Scientific Innovation, E. Parasidis (Oxford). Choice
• 2025 — Structure of Ideas: Free Expression in the AI Era, J. Schroeder (Stanford). Political Science Quarterly
• 2024 — Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI, Josh Simons (Princeton). Review of Politics 86(2)
• 2022 — Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny by Michael Tomasello (Harvard). International Dialogue, 12
• 2022 — Governing through Expertise: Politics of Bioethics, A. Littoz-Monnet (Cambridge). Pol Sci Q 137(2)
• 2021 — Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting (Pennsylvania). Perspectives on Politics 19(3)
• 2020 — Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Samuel Moyn (Harvard). Kritikon Litterarum 47(3–4)

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Grants 2022-2025

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Period

Funding Source

Project Title

Role

Amount

2025–2029

NSF

Brain Organoids & Neuromorphic Computing

Co-PI, ELSI/Bioethics

$2M

2025

GovDept/VPR SRG 

Bioethics USA/India (Why No Universal Ethics?)

Field Research, India

$9K

2023–24

UT CoLA

Indigeneity & Darwin's Theory of Evolution

Curriculum Innovation

$10K

2023

Texas Global

Autonomy & Gene Editing Guidelines (Indonesia)

Estab Univ-Univ Collaboration

$2.5K

2023–25

NSF

Synthetic Adhesome Cells: Building a Cell

Co-PI, ELSI/Bioethics

$1.05M+

2021–22

Fulbright

Human Rights & Genetic Engineering

Distinguished Chair, Sweden

560,000 SEK

2022

UT OVPR R&CG

Liberal Bioethics in Illiberal States

Field Research, Singapore

$10K

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Teaching Awards 

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• College of Liberal Arts Committees on Research and Teaching: Silver Spurs Fellowship
• Tricoli Civil Discourse Pedagogy Design Award, College of Liberal Arts
• Robert Conklin Faculty Fellow, Plan II Honors Program

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Scholarship, Major Themes

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Political Proceduralism in Bioethics and Human Rights

• Political bioethics and the role of proceduralism in public moral reasoning
• Human genetic engineering and genome editing: political and ethical oversight
• Artificial intelligence: institutional responsibility, moral agency, democratic control
• Teaching human rights across culturally diverse global contexts
• Procedural approaches to managing disagreement in bioethics and rights governance

Social Construction in Grounding Social and Political Norms

• Social construction as an alternative to metaphysical or theological foundations of liberal democracy
• Human rights as socially constructed norms; proposal for the Human Rights State
• Cognitive sociology of rights, knowledge, moral judgment
• Foundations of rights and democratic legitimacy through constructed social meanings

Democratic Governance in Rights, Bioethics, Policy on Cutting-Edge Technologies

• Governing emerging science and technology, including human genetic engineering
• Democratic control of artificial intelligence

Justice in Pluralistic Societies with Indeterminate Norms

• Pluralism, enlightened localism, and the interplay of thick moralities with thin politics
• Social integration in complex societies: normative and institutional challenges of cohesion in liberal democracies
• Comparative legal and constitutional thought
• Cross-national inquiry into legal and constitutional theory
• Legal adaptation to deep pluralism and indeterminate public norms
• Indigenous rights, self-determination, and proposal for the Indigenous Rights State
• Indigeneity and environmental stewardship
• Environmental and climate justice 

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A Social Scientific Approach to Analyzing Political Phenomena

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As a political theorist, I deploy the approach of social construction (or social constructivism) in a distinctive way that reflects my broader commitment to democratic theory, normative individualism, and the role of public reason. While I draw on some standard understandings from sociology and philosophy, my work in politics and bioethics emphasizes the normative and political implications of social constructs.

I define social construction as the idea that many features of human life—such as values, identities, institutions, and even some of the cultural ways we interpret natural scientific data—are not given by nature or determined by metaphysics. They are created, maintained, and modifiable by human practices, norms, and institutions. Hence they are contingent, context-dependent, and (in principle, at least) open to democratic critique and change. I deploy social construction as a normative, political, and epistemological framework that sees central features of human life not as fixed by nature or divinely ordained but as products of human deliberation and capable of democratic transformation. This approach is forward-looking. It aims to empower societies to reimagine and reconfigure their moral and political frameworks in humane, reasoned ways. It is central to my arguments for democratically legitimate bioethics, human rights without metaphysics, and the social construction of human nature.

Key themes in my analytic use of social construction include:

• Anti-Essentialism: I reject the idea that there is a fixed human nature or universal moral truths rooted in metaphysics. I emphasize the constructed and revisable nature of concepts like dignity, autonomy, or human nature.
• Normative Constructivism: I align social construction with normative constructivism: the view that values are not given or discovered but constructed through collective human reasoning. This allows for democratic deliberation to determine the content of bioethical norms and human rights norms.
• Democratic Epistemology: In Human Rights as Social Construction (2012) and The Human Rights State (2016), I argue that social constructs must always be subject to public reasoning and democratic contestation, and never dictated or imposed by religious, cultural, political, economic or metaphysical authority.
• Applied to Human Biology and Bioethics: In Constructing Human Nature: The Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering (2022), I argue that even concepts like human nature are socially constructed and should be open to political debate, especially in light of advances in genetic science and engineering. I propose that human nature is not a metaphysical constant but a social construct, open to revision as societies evolve in their normative self-understanding.