My PhD research was part of the EU-funded EMERGE project, which investigated emergent awareness in minimal collectives. My work focused on developing the concept of awareness and establishing a framework for evaluating and comparing awareness across heterogeneous systems and collectives. My PhD thesis applied this framework to both nonhuman animals and artificial systems, with a particular emphasis on robot swarms. ​

I’m interested in how (cognitive) capacities can be evaluated and compared across different kinds of systems, and in the role concepts in cognitive science or biology, such as awareness, play in theory formation. In particular, I’m interested in how these concepts shape and constrain the systems to which theories can be applied and the phenomena that can be investigated.