Samantha Copeland

Profile

I came to philosophy through the humanities, graduating from the early years of the BHum degree at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. I did a Masters of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Ontario, looking at the impact of psychopharmacology—using pills to treat mental disorders—on how we think about psychiatric categories. For my PhD dissertation, ‘The Case of the Triggered Memory’, I joined my interests in how scientific knowledge is produced and changes when new technology is developed with the ethics of curiosity-driven science when human participants are needed for research. From there, I joined the CauseHealth project for three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Life Science. In the meantime, I co-founded the Serendipity Society. I joined TU Delft as an Assistant Professor in 2018.

Research

At TU Delft I am working on the ethics of resilience, bringing what we know about how positive results can come out of unexpected events—like in cases of serendipity—together with how we ought to prepare a response to unexpected but potentially disastrous events and disruptions. In both of these contexts, issues of distributive and epistemic justice are intertwined with the epistemology of knowledge production. It is at this intersection that my work resides.

On serendipity in science: discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom. Synthese https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1544-3

Chair of The Serendipity Society