Research Interests

Dr. Gallagher is broadly trained in moral and political philosophy, and specializes in problems at the intersection of ethics, theories of justice, and science. Her applied research interests focus on the ethical and public policy implications of scientific and technological innovation – in particular, on recent advances in the biomedical sciences and computing. She also works, in a less applied fashion, on a number of topics in the philosophy of science whose conceptual analysis matters to normative theory – including chance, causation, and cognition. She received her A.B. from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University, where her dissertation research was on the ethics of risk imposition and distribution. She has held previous academic appointments at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, CSUN, and USC. At UCLA, she teaches MCDB 60: Biomedical Ethics, and Philosophy 6: Introduction to Political Philosophy.

Selected Publications

Ongoing and current projects include work on the relationship between risk imposition and legitimizing consent in clinical research; the moral status of novel research subjects in stem cell biology; theoretical foundations of “ethical AI;” and counterfactual analyses of harm.