McKenna Fitzgerald#
McKenna studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and is now Deputy Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a research institute studying risks that could be catastrophic at a global scale. She got there on a 2018 BA, not a PhD. In April 2022 she gave our workshop on ethics for preventing global catastrophe. Her field has its own guide: Risk & Catastrophic Risk.
Geoff Keeling#
Geoff finished his philosophy PhD at Bristol in 2020 and is now a bioethicist at Google. In November 2021 he talked to us about bioethics and ethics consulting for tech companies. His job title alone answers a question students often ask: yes, big tech companies employ philosophers to do ethics full time. See the AI & Data Ethics guide.
Christine Jakobson#
Christine went from a philosophy PhD at Cambridge to Principia Advisory, a consultancy that organisations pay for advice on ethics, where she is an Associate Principal. She gave our ethics consulting workshop in October 2021. Her work sits where two of our guides meet: Ethics Consulting for the subject, and Management Consulting for the advisory model.
Jim Baxter#
Jim did his philosophy PhD at Leeds and stayed, but on the consulting side: he leads the professional ethics consultancy team at the IDEA Centre, which organisations pay for advice on applied ethics. He walked us through professional ethics consultancy in July 2021. The Ethics Consulting guide covers this route, including the university-centre version of it.
Kathryn Mecrow-Flynn#
Kathryn built Magnify Mentoring and leads it as CEO and President. She came to us in July 2021 to talk about high-impact mentoring. Her story spans two guides: Business, Mentoring & Beyond for the mentoring work itself, and Entrepreneurship & Startups for what it takes to build the organisation.
Mariana Razina#
Mariana co-founded our St Andrews chapter, which brought talks, workshops and networking sessions to philosophy students on campus. She now works as a freelance marketer.
Yangtian Xu#
Yangtian co-founded the St Andrews chapter alongside Mariana. He is now a summer analyst at Bank of America.
More journeys from the library#
- Alessandra Fassio — Senior Data Ethicist at the UK Ministry of Justice, the first and only role of its kind in her department, with a philosophy MA and an MSc from Edinburgh behind it. Read our full interview.
- Katie Evans — freelance AI ethics consultant with an MA in ethical and political philosophy from the Sorbonne; she has worked with IEEE on ethical standards for autonomous vehicles, with IRCAI on AI policy, and with UNESCO. Read our full interview.
- Joshua Bucheli — political and legal philosophy MA (Bern), former Let’s Phi head of community, now in cybersecurity recruitment at Cyberunity. His own account is on the about page, and the Cybersecurity & Recruitment guide covers his field.
- Alex Yates — wrote a doctoral dissertation on Frege’s philosophy of logic at St Andrews, then built a career in content marketing, first freelance and then full time. Covered in the Media & Writing guide.
- Christina Norgard Rud — Philosophy & Public Policy MSc (LSE), co-founder of Squid, a cross-chain liquidity startup. Covered in Blockchain & Fintech and Entrepreneurship & Startups.
- Noam Maoz — MA in Philosophy of Technology (Tel-Aviv), risk prevention specialist in tech at Meta and long-time community member. Covered in the Risk & Catastrophic Risk guide.
Is your story missing from this page? If you studied philosophy and built a career outside academia, we’d love to interview you — one relaxed conversation, and your story helps the next philosopher make the leap. Reach out to Konrad on LinkedIn.