Javier Gomez-Lavin
Javier Gomez-Lavin is an assistant professor with the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University whose research lies at the intersection of cognitive science, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind and who will serve as the incoming director of the new Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) and the College of Liberal Arts’ Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) Labs. Javier’s interdisciplinary work blends methods from experimental social psychology and analytical philosophy of science to help detail the multifaceted ways that cognition both shapes and is shaped by our social, aesthetic, and moral worlds.
Prior to coming to Purdue, Javier was a sessional assistant professor with the Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Program at York University in Toronto. From 2018 to 2021, Javier held a Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania where he worked with Professor Lisa Miracchi Titus and her MIRA lab group.
Javier earned his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 2018 where he wrote his dissertation disputing the usefulness of the psychological construct of “working memory” under the supervision of Professor Jesse Prinz. During his time at CUNY Javier served as a co-PI on a two-and-a-half-year grant funded by the Templeton Foundation which used tools from experimental philosophy to extend new, moral theories of personal identity. From 2016 to 2019, Javier held a role as a guest researcher with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, an interdisciplinary institute at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.