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 machine learning (AI), neuroscience, and psychology from the perspective of general philosophy of science.
My research is especially interested in carving out space in the philosophy of cognitive science (broadly construed) for constraint-based explanations of reliable performance, which explain the possibility of high rates of success by revealing how performing systems satisfy various constraints, notably task constraints imposed by the environment. A recurring theme in my work is that the tasks we design for and administer 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’.