I am an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). I specialise in the philosophy of neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning from the perspective of general philosophy of science. I’m interested in relating various forms of explanation, modelling, analysis, and design across these three fields. A recurring theme in my work is that the tasks designed for and administered to both natural and artificial systems play fundamental roles in shaping and scaffolding how we explain, analyse, model, and design those systems.
Before joining UTEP, I completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2024–2025) and at the Centre for Philosophy & AI Research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (2023–2024). In Spring 2023, I finished my doctorate in philosophy at the University of Arizona under the co-supervision of Sara Aronowitz and Mark Timmons. I also earned two doctoral minors, one in neuroscience and another in cognitive science.
My name is Arabic/Urdu. It’s pronounced “AH-lee-ah roo-MAH-nah” with a light, tapped ‘r’.