I am working on a project on the relation between the life sciences and metaphysics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Specifically, I am tracing the evolution of the concepts of mechanism, teleology, individuation, and laws in the metaphysics of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Albrecht von Haller, and Caspar Friedrich Wolff as each one tries to explain the generation of new organisms.

I have also published and am also working on a number of papers on early modern women philosophers, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, and Émilie Du Châtelet. These will culminate in three larger projects. The first project is on Cavendish's metaphysics and natural philosophy, including their relation to her political philosophy (especially as implied in her fiction), and including the conceptual relation between her philosophy and that of Hobbes and Spinoza. The second project – in collaboration with Andrew Janiak (Duke) – is on Du Châtelet's natural philosophy, its conceptual relation to the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff and Newton, her historical role in the emergence of modern science, and the gendered context of the sciences in the early modern period. The third project uses the works of early modern women philosophers as a prism through which to examine questions in the historiography of philosophy.

I have teaching interests in the Philosophy of Education. I have started research (with papers forthcoming on women and education as found in the thought of Astell and of Cavendish and Hobbes) on early modern educational theories, including an investigation of theories of women's education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

My primary research concerns the philosophical issues surrounding the scientific method. Specifically, I am interested in the construction, development, and analysis of theories and models in computationally complex sciences such as population biology and chemistry. I pursue these interests in a variety of projects spanning traditional as well as novel areas in philosophy of science, including philosophy of biology, philosophy of chemistry, and the social structure of science.