#  Announcing the 2025-26 Fellows-in-Residence, Civil Discourse Fellows, and Graduate Fellows 

 





May 23, 2025

 

 

     ![Grid with headshots of ELSCE 2025-26 Fellows](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-05/2025-26%20ELSE%20Fellows.png?itok=DQUGCvlT) 

 



 

The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is delighted to announce our Fellows-in-Residence, Civil Discourse Fellows, and Graduate Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year. The incoming Fellows are an exceptional group of scholars, and we look forward to welcoming them in the fall.



 

 

 

##  Fellows-in-Residence 

 



### Emad H. Atiq 

 

**Emad H. Atiq** is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the Cornell Law School and the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell. He works on the nature of norms and normativity and is interested especially in how norms of different kinds - such as moral, epistemic, and legal norms - relate. He has two primary research projects at the moment. One project defends the view that epistemic norms help explain the force of moral norms, leveraging a theory of how perceptual awareness grounds knowledge. Another project explores the role of moral reasoning and moral deference in legal interpretation. Apart from these projects, Atiq continues to write on the nature of perceptual awareness, empathy, decision-making under uncertainty, jurisprudence, and private law theory.



 



      ![Emad H. Atiq](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/5_2.png?itok=lgqmyBic) 

 

 

  

 



### Sorcha A. Brophy 

 

**Sorcha A. Brophy** is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. She is an organizational sociologist and health policy scholar, whose research agenda focuses on (1) politics within and between health professionals, (2) health workforce challenges, and (3) contestation around values in healthcare. She has a book under contract at Stanford University Press on the politics of organizational ethics and has recently authored articles in health policy, sociology, and bioethics journals including: *The Bulletin of the WHO, Hastings Center Report, BMJ, Journal of Professions and Organization,* and *The Journal of Health Politics, Policy & Law.* She is currently conducting ethnographic, interview, focus group, and survey-based research on politics surrounding nurse staffing and community health centers. While at the Center for Ethics she will work on a project about nurse staffing and healthcare unions.



 



      ![Sorcha A. Brophy](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/4.png?itok=WzHij089) 

 

 

  

 



### Sahar Heydari Fard 

 

**Sahar Heydari Fard** is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University. Her research lies at the intersection of social and political philosophy, philosophy of social science, and formal epistemology. She explores the dynamics of social change, examining how decentralized social structures contribute to systemic injustice and inequality, as well as the potential of social movements to challenge and transform them. Using formal methods such as evolutionary game theory and computational modeling, she investigates the mechanisms that sustain or disrupt these patterns. Her current work examines how epistemic norms - such as those governing disagreement and polarization - shape collective action and influence the possibilities for meaningful social change.



 



      ![Sahar Heydari Fard](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/3.png?itok=GG2EJ2f8) 

 

 

  

 



### Jacob Jorem 

 

**Jacob Jorem** is a psychiatrist, lawyer, and researcher focusing on mental health policy, health law, and bioethics. As a Harkness Fellow at the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, his research centers on improving access to and quality of mental health care. Previously, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University while completing his interdisciplinary PhD on the introduction of a capacity-based mental health law in Norway. He was also an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo. Jorem has authored several scientific articles, reports, and a book chapter, and has extensive teaching experience. He has served as Head of the Secretariat for the Expert Committee on Decision-Making Capacity and senior adviser at the Norwegian Directorate of Health. In clinical practice, Jorem was a chief physician in adult psychiatric divisions in Oslo, delivering high-quality patient care. His expertise in health policy and bioethics is shaped by his experiences in government, litigation, clinical practice, and ethics committees. Jorem will be a joint fellow at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School.



 



      ![Jacob Jorem](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/Headshots%20for%20website.png?itok=fO-yvu-4) 

 

 

  

 



### Netta Kahana 

 

Netta Kahana is a cultural sociologist with a deep interest in morality, social solidarity, and both personal and social transformation. Using a range of qualitative research methods, she explores moral meaning-making processes in volunteer settings, situating them within broader social phenomena such as individualization and polarization. Her current project is a comparative analysis of diverse sites of volunteering, aiming to shed light on how volunteers understand and enact moral commitment to others in an era of growing polarization and moral divides. Netta received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her doctoral dissertation focused on volunteer tourism and examined moral commitment to distant strangers across physical, cultural, and social boundaries. Netta has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University and at the Business School at the Hebrew University. Her work has been published in top-ranking journals, including *Annals of Tourism Research*, *Social Problems*, *Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management*, and *Tourist Studies*. Kahana is the Tel Aviv University Exchange Fellow-in-Residence for the 25-26 academic year.



 



      ![Netta Kahana](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/FIR%202025-26%20headshots.png?itok=OE0LKd9J) 

 

 

  

 



### Lucas Stanczyk 

 

**Lucas Stanczyk** is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He works on topics at the intersection of political philosophy and political economy, including the significance of growing class inequality and the conditions of well-ordered social reproduction in advanced industrialized societies. As a Fellow-in-Residence, he will be working on the ethical dimensions of the climate crisis. The aim is to develop a non-consequentialist approach to thinking about intergenerational justice that is adequate to the special challenges presented by the climate crisis, including the need to make sacrifices to accelerate the global energy transition and the need to make fateful social decisions under conditions of severe uncertainty.



 



      ![Lucas Stanczyk](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/2.png?itok=UCYZ2KS2) 

 

 

  

 



### Carissa Véliz 

 

**Carissa Véliz** is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed *Privacy Is Power* (an *Economist* book of the year, 2020), *The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance* (OUP 2024) and the editor of the *Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics*. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI, and a board member of Proton Foundation. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI.



 



      ![Carissa Véliz](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/6.png?itok=pgsCHQct) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

##  Civil Discourse Fellows 

 



### Maya Cohen 

 

**Maya Cohen** is a PhD Candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studies civic development and the teaching and practice of civic discourse in higher education. She is currently the Civil Discourse Graduate Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics. While at HGSE, Cohen has helped to launch and lead the Center for Ethics's Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership. She was awarded the Center’s Ethics Pedagogy Fellowship from 2019-2021, and an Initiative Fellowship with the Center's Design Studio for Ethics and Civic Pedagogy from 2022-2024. She also served as Development Editor of the *Harvard Educational Review*. Prior to her doctoral training, Cohen worked at Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center (CFJC), was the Assistant Director of The School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington, D.C., and served as the Executive Director of GlobeMed. Cohen holds a BA in English from Barnard College and an EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.



 



      ![Maya Cohen](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/1.png?itok=rxRAdoSG) 

 

 

  

 



### Jason D’Cruz 

 

**Jason D’Cruz** is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University at Albany, State University of New York and Principle Investigator for *Trustworthy AI from a User Perspective*, a project funded by a grant from the SUNY-IBM AI Research Alliance. He works primarily in ethics and moral psychology on the topics of trust, promising, rationalization, and self-deception. While at the Center he will be at work on a book manuscript that explores the relationship between interpersonal trust and moral courage.



 



      ![Jason D’Cruz](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/2_0.png?itok=CSBnWMpt) 

 

 

  

 



### Cassie Finley 

 

**Cassie Finley** is currently the Dialogue & Civil Disagreement Fellow at Wesleyan University while finishing her dissertation in Philosophy at the University of Iowa. Her work draws from virtue theory and philosophy of education to develop Virtue Dialogue Theory - a pedagogical framework for cultivating moral, intellectual, and civic virtues through, and for the sake of, meaningful dialogues. Her fellowship at Wesleyan has involved designing and implementing undergraduate courses focused on cultivating virtues and improving dialogues, integrating insights from moral and intellectual character education, community of philosophical inquiry, and resources developed by the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership. In addition to her research and work at Wesleyan, she has spent the past few years teaching philosophy to middle and high school students, which has deeply informed her approach to civil disagreement through combining philosophical dialogue with the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues.



 



      ![Cassie Finley](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/3_0.png?itok=0f2epyLJ) 

 

 

  

 



### Aundrey (Drey) Page 

 

**Aundrey (Drey) Page** is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Education, focused on addressing wealth inequality through emancipatory, healing-centered frameworks and fostering cross-sector collaboration that aims to create a more just world. This past year, he served as a FiVE fellow at the Center, launching Communitas - an engaging, constructive dialogue program at Quincy House. Before Harvard, he was a high school math teacher and later a principal, where he led remarkable turnarounds in student achievement, enrollment, community engagement, and diversity among staff and leaders despite the challenges of a global pandemic. Page has also served as a senior executive, where he transformed organizational operations, streamlined costs, and amplified national impact through a strategic theory of action. He brings a strategic and action-oriented leadership style honed over years of executive experience.



 



      ![Aundrey (Drey) Page](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/4_0.png?itok=lFLW_hHm) 

 

 

  

 



### Brian Palmiter 

 

**Brian Palmiter** is a PhD candidate in Political Theory in the Harvard Department of Government. His research interests span a range of topics in ethics and democratic theory. His dissertation explores the normative challenges posed to American constitutional practice by the use of legal-but-norm-violating political tactics. At Harvard, Palmiter has taught courses in bioethics, constitutional law, the history of political thought, and democratic theory, in addition to coordinating the Graduate Political Theory Workshop. Prior to starting his doctoral studies, he taught 8th and 9th grade English as a Teach for America corps member in Memphis, TN. He holds a BA in Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy from Michigan State University.



 



      ![Brian Palmiter](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/6_0.png?itok=yVMS_7T6) 

 

 

  

 



### Matthew Willis 

 

**Matthew Willis** is a philosopher working in social and political epistemology. His research on epistemic responsibility examines the obligations that individuals owe one another as conscientious reasoners in environments of great uncertainty or polarization. His recent work explores how the epistemic activity of agents shapes their epistemic environments, creating dynamic interplay between epistemic communities and the conditions of their shared problem spaces.



 



      ![Matthew Willis](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/5_0.png?itok=J06qg7DV) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

##  Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellows 

 



### Bethany Cates 

 

**Bethany Cates** is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. Her dissertation addresses a central question in contemporary American housing policy: how should authority over housing policy be distributed? Herdissertation explores the possibilities available to liberal democratic governments to respect legitimate interests in local control while also meeting the various claims of non-local citizens. Before coming to Harvard, Cates spent a year serving as a research assistant for Professor Guyora Binder at the University at Buffalo School of Law. Before that, she received her B.S. in physics from MIT, with a minor in political science. She is a steadfast and ever-suffering fan of the Buffalo Bills.



 



      ![Bethany Cates](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/1_0.png?itok=2eXsSoO_) 

 

 

  

 



### Sagnik Das 

 

**Sagnik Das** is an S.J.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science) candidate at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the history of human rights discourse in the post-Cold War era, centralizing the role of international lawyers. In particular, he looks at how human rights interact with the laws of war as well as international economic law. More broadly, his research and teaching interests are in the fields of public international law, international legal history and comparative constitutional law. Das graduated from the LL.M. (masters) program at Harvard Law School in 2019, after completing his first law degree at National Law University, Jodhpur, India. He has clerked at the High Court of Delhi in India, worked in the arbitration practice of an international law firm in Paris, and taught international law at an Indian law school. He has also taught courses in the history and Gen Ed departments at Harvard College, along with teaching Legal Research for LLM students at Harvard Law School.



 



      ![Sagnik Das](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/2_1.png?itok=a4gis5pL) 

 

 

  

 



### Abbie LeBlanc 

 

**Abbie LeBlanc** is a PhD candidate studying political theory in Harvard's Department of Government. Her dissertation considers the relationship between voyages to the moon, real and imagined, and the history of political thought. Such voyages probe the limits of sovereignty, property, and empire - concepts that have undergirded our present global political structures since the beginnings of European colonization - and also highlight the importance of thinking beyond this colonial heritage. This project brings together a broad array of LeBlanc's interests in the history of political thought, including particularly early modern political thought, Indigenous political thought, settler colonialism, feminism, and the politics of the novel. She has published on Rousseau’s *Émile*, Míkmaw treaty-making, education, and Thomas Hardy. Prior to Harvard, she completed a BA (Hons) at St. Thomas University (New Brunswick, Canada) in 2019 and an MA at McGill University in 2021.



 



      ![Abbie LeBlanc](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/3_1.png?itok=_mBp6SjZ) 

 

 

  

 



### Malcolm Morano 

 

**Malcolm Morano** is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University. His dissertation attempts to develop a theory of what the question of "the meaning of life" is a question about, why we ask it, and how answers to it (or the lack thereof) are related to our deepest ethical commitments. He is broadly interested in the nature of normativity, the way ethical commitments do or do not require certain metaphysical views for support, and the role of utopian thinking in politics. Morano was formerly an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and holds a BA in Philosophy and Music from Fordham University.



 



      ![Malcolm Morano](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/4_1.png?itok=uMflSijl) 

 

 

  

 



### Hwei Ru Ong 

 

**Hwei Ru Ong** is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages & Civilizations. He is writing a dissertation on the legal history and political philosophy of the first Chinese empires. Using excavated materials and transmitted texts, this project traces the emergence of a legal culture in the lead up to imperial expansion. He also works on the manuscript cultures of the silk roads spanning premodern Inner Asia, particularly the translation of texts and circulation of knowledge amongst Indo-Iranian, Sinitic, and Tungusic sources. At Harvard, Ong has served as a teaching fellow for courses in philosophy, economic governance, and history of science.



 



      ![Hwei Ru Ong](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/5_1.png?itok=2fjdvwzX) 

 

 

  

 



### Jan-Paul Sandmann 

 

**Jan-Paul Sandmann** is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Harvard’s Department of Government. Drawing on the thought of Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno, his dissertation probes the role of art in society. For Mann and Adorno, art - even, and sometimes precisely because of, its political ambiguity - holds a distinctive promise: it unsettles established certainties, sustains ongoing critique, and provokes deeper questions about the good life. Sandmann’s dissertation examines both the potential and the risks of this view for liberal democracies, where the ideal of a socially resonant culture of art is often treated as a matter of individual enrichment, but less often regarded as contributing to important civic virtues. Before coming to Harvard, Sandmann studied Government, Economics, and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. He has since served as a Teaching Fellow for courses in moral and political philosophy, as well as on German social thought.



 



      ![Jan-Paul Sandmann](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-05/6_1.png?itok=lcvq5pVN)