I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Cincinnati, working on the relationship between language and cognition, with an emphasis on embodied cognition. The focus of my dissertation is the intersection of philosophy of mind/cognitive science and linguistic relativity. Relatedly, I am interested in the effects of diagnostic labels on self-understanding and various issues in bioethics.

I was born and raised in the beautiful city of Giessen, Germany. I started taking philosophy classes in high school, where I was fortunate to learn from Dr. Asher J. Mattern, whose expertise in Ricoeur and the history of philosophy, from the Presocratics to contemporary French thought, sparked my interest in the subject. He also introduced me to the Platonic dialogues, which led me to decide to study philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.

As an undergraduate at the University of Heidelberg, I worked with other great professors, such as Prof. Anton Friedrich Koch and Dr. Roberto Vinco, aiming for a broad overview of the history of philosophy. I took courses on Plato and Aristotle, several scholastic philosophers, early modern philosophy, Kant, German Idealism, and Heidegger. I was also fortunate to learn French and study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year (in French). In my B.A. thesis, I compared Heidegger's and Hegel's interpretations of Heraclitus, focusing on how each mobilized the same fragments to argue for diametrically opposed ideas: for Hegel, Heraclitus was one of the first thinkers to promote the idea of unconstrained rationality that leaves nothing uncovered, while for Heidegger, he was among the first to realize that nature or being hides itself from human grasp.

As a master's student at the University of Bonn, where I first came into contact with the intersection of philosophy and science. Although I initially continued to study Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, I eventually focused on contemporary philosophy of mind. I was lucky enough to spend a semester at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, where I took courses in philosophy of mind and cognitive science with Murat Aydede, Evan Thompson, and Eric Margolis. I also learned a lot from Michael N. Forster about Herder, German Romanticism, and the origins of linguistics and anthropology. Finally, I wrote my master's thesis under the supervision of Michael N. Forster (University of Bonn & University of Chicago) and Murat Aydede (UBC). The topic was "The Prejudice of Mental Universality in the Philosophy of Mind".