Heather Douglas

Heather Douglas joined MSU’s Department of Philosophy in the Fall of 2018. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and society, including the role of social and ethical values in science, the nature of scientists’ responsibility in and for science, and science-policy interfaces such as science advising, science funding, responsible research oversight/cultivation, and public engagement with science. She has also worked on the nature of objectivity in science and how to weigh complex, non-convergent sets of evidence.

She is the author of dozens of articles and essays, several edited collections, The Rightful Place of Science:  Science, Values, and Democracy (2021), and Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (2009). She is the editor of the University of Pittsburgh Press book series Science, Values, and the Public book series. She is a senior fellow of the Institute for Science, Society, and Policy at the University of Ottawa and a member of the Socially Engaged Philosophy of Science Group at MSU. She serves on the Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science (of the International Science Council) and on the National Academies of Science committee for revising On Being a Scientist.  In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

She is interested in and willing to direct graduate work, particularly involving philosophical approaches to science policy issues or philosophy of science work with clear science policy implications. Her MSU graduate seminars include Responsibility in Science (2025), Values in Science (2023), History of Philosophy of Science 1900-1960 (2022), Science, Citizens, and Democracy (2020), and The Commercialization of Science (2019). Past graduate student projects she has directed include Ty Branch’s Contextualizing Science for Value-Conscious Communication (2019) and Char Brecevic’s Patient Nonadherence: Imagining a Way Forward (2022).

For more about her work, see her google scholar page, her wikipedia page, or her academia page.