I am a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist at Indiana University Bloomington. In the academic year 2025/26, I am going to be the Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
I use smell to rethink the mind and brain.
What makes our perception of the world real if our individual experience of it so often differs? This question drives my research both in theory and at the laboratory bench, and I explore this question through philosophical and empirical methods. These methods combine conceptual with historical analysis and phenomenology, as well as electroencephalography (EEG), olfactometry, and laboratory ethnography with interviews.
My career is unconventional in its trajectory.
I obtained my Ph.D. in philosophy, advised by John Dupré (2013; University of Exeter, UK), before I furthered my research as a postdoctoral fellow at the KLI Institute, Austria (2013-15, formerly the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research). The Presidential Scholarship in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York (2015-18) provided me the opportunity to work in the laboratory of the olfactory neuroscientist Stuart Firestein. I joined Indiana University Bloomington in 2018 as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program prior to my dual appointment as TT Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine and the Cognitive Science Program in 2019. My lab 'The Stink Tank' started in November 2021.
Email: abarwich_at_iu_dot_edu
I use smell to rethink the mind and brain.
What makes our perception of the world real if our individual experience of it so often differs? This question drives my research both in theory and at the laboratory bench, and I explore this question through philosophical and empirical methods. These methods combine conceptual with historical analysis and phenomenology, as well as electroencephalography (EEG), olfactometry, and laboratory ethnography with interviews.
My career is unconventional in its trajectory.
I obtained my Ph.D. in philosophy, advised by John Dupré (2013; University of Exeter, UK), before I furthered my research as a postdoctoral fellow at the KLI Institute, Austria (2013-15, formerly the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research). The Presidential Scholarship in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York (2015-18) provided me the opportunity to work in the laboratory of the olfactory neuroscientist Stuart Firestein. I joined Indiana University Bloomington in 2018 as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program prior to my dual appointment as TT Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine and the Cognitive Science Program in 2019. My lab 'The Stink Tank' started in November 2021.
Email: abarwich_at_iu_dot_edu
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