Aboutwho I am.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where I have been since 2023. I work mostly on the ethics of AI, normative ethics (especially contractualism), and moral psychology. My dissertation, advised by R. Jay Wallace and Johann Frick, asks whether it is ever fair to hold an artificial agent morally responsible for what it does, drawing both on the philosophical literature on responsibility in humans and on recent empirical work on large language models. Other recent work discusses: the ethics of attention, the conflict between subjective and objective perspectives about ourselves, and how AI models that predict our preferences change them. I am also interested in Ancient Greek and Literary Chinese (文言文), and I enjoy studying historical moral psychology in both. Outside my research, I also teach at Berkeley as a Graduate Student Instructor, most recently in Ancient Philosophy.

Before turning to philosophy, I studied computer science at Harvard (A.B. 2018) and worked as a software engineer at Microsoft, Snap, and several startups. I took my first philosophy course in my penultimate semester at Harvard and was hooked. I went on to study philosophy at Cambridge (B.A. 2023, Wolfson College). The personal statement I wrote when applying names AI as the reason “the field of technology ethics is flourishing”, and the ethics of AI is now at the center of my research. The statement also asks whether recommendation systems push us to regress to the mean. Six years later, I ended up taking up the same question more seriously in “The Disturbance Problem”.

I still take on some engineering. Starting in 2023, I took on a part-time role leading a small team to rebuild a platform that delivers Cognitive Stimulation Therapy to people with dementia and provide advice to their caregivers; the platform’s conversational agent had to keep strictly to clinically approved scripts. In 2026, I built a voice advisor for first-time parents based on an early-childhood educator’s lectures.

While at Harvard, I also studied classical piano performance at the New England Conservatory, through the Harvard–NEC dual-degree program (M.M. 2019). I still play, and I have performed concertos with orchestras including the Houston Symphony and the Cambridge University Orchestra. A few recordings are in keys, and reviews contains a diary of the concerts I attend. Two of my side projects are about classical music. Paraphon aligns every performance from the 2025 Chopin Competition, so that one can switch between pianists mid-phrase and compare recordings in detail. KPHP is a classical radio station that broadcasts only to me and saves playlists to my phone, following the programming rules of WHRB, the Harvard radio station of which I loved being a member.

Outside of all this: I am hoping for a sub-3 Monday and a sub-15 Sunday New York Times crossword. My blitz chess rating floats around 1700, depending on how much I’ve slept and how tilted I am. I love going for a run in Tilden, a walk in Marin, or a quick overnight backpacking trip along the coast or, in the summer, the Emigrant Wilderness. I am still chasing the dragon of the best iced pourover coffee I had in Japan in 2020. I grew up in Houston and now live in Berkeley, and I speak English, Mandarin, and Spanish.