I am an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University Department of Philosophy.

My research is in the philosophy and methodology of the statistical social sciences. I am interested in both philosophically-informed-science and scientifically-informed-philosophy. Basically, my projects will try to do one of two things: 1) identify a methodological concern discussed by social scientists and see if providing a philosophical analysis can help the dialogue make progress, or 2) identify a philosophical thesis that seems to involve factual claims about the social world and ask whether the social sciences are equipped to supply them.

I can also be persuaded to undertake/supervise projects in philosophical logic, philosophy about machine learning, game and decision theory, most areas of technical philosophy, and historical topics around the Vienna Circle.

The dog’s name is Tarski.

I am very, very bad with names and faces. I routinely blank out on my friends’ names. You might not have noticed because I am very good at masking and have developed a variety of strategies to compensate. But please do not be offended if you manage to catch me forgetting who you are, especially when I’m meeting you outside the context in which I first met you. It would be very helpful if you remind me, but I often also have various tricks I use to find out who you are afterwards.

I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC- Irvine in 2021. I possess a MA degree in philosophy from Simon Fraser University and a Bachelor’s in both psychology and philosophy from the University of British Columbia.

I am one of the co-directors of the Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis (APDA) project.

I have a blog! It hasn’t been updated in forever, but it’s there.

I co-founded Wonder Philosophy, a workshop and resource pool for students wanting to know more about philosophy graduate school. Read an interview with the APA blog here. It’s also no longer active.

I host a podcast, Off Campus, on alternative-to-academia career paths for people with Ph.D. or almost-Ph.D. in humanities disciplines. You can listen here, or on most major podcast platforms. I am not currently working on it anymore, but you can still listen to old episodes.

Contact

My email is kino_zhao@sfu.ca. This is the best way to contact me.

Sometimes my information is listed under my legal first name “Yuting”.

I am on PhilPeople but I don’t check it much. I am not on Academia.edu or ResearchGate. I am on Bluesky @kinozhao but I don’t check it much either.