Maddie Dowd

Maddie Dowd is a student seeking intersections. An undergraduate at Harvard College, she studies Philosophy on the Mind, Brain, Behavior track with a secondary in Human Evolutionary Biology; she is primarily interested in what happens when philosophy and science inform one another. Much of her work is in animal ethics, examining our relationship to nonhuman animals and the extent of our moral obligations to them. Currently, she is writing a senior thesis on cross-species empathy, intersubjectivity, and moral imagination.
 
Her scholarship in animal ethics is part of a larger interest in kinds of intelligence beyond the human; naturally, this extends to philosophy of mind around AI and computing, as well as ethical and normative considerations around technology. She is a research assistant at metaLAB Harvard, contributing to ethics initiatives under the LLM Personality Variance Project and the AI Pedagogy Project, as well as assisting with editorial and operations work for the group.
 
A San Francisco native, Maddie believes the West Coast reigns supreme (but she’s coming around to Boston). She grew up hiking, camping, and swimming her way across California’s beautiful landscapes, cultivating a lifelong fascination with animals and interconnected networks. When she’s not philosophizing, Maddie enjoys writing comedy and creative nonfiction, getting to know trees, and having long conversations with new people.