ABOUT ME
Welcome to my website. I’m a Mexican immigrant in the US living in Terre Haute, IN, with a B.A. in philosophy and English from Williams College and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. I’m an Ethical Systems & Trust Architect: I translate moral philosophy and ethical theory into practical tools for designing, evaluating, and governing high-stakes socio-technical systems (including AI, platforms, organizations, and institutions) so they better protect and promote human dignity, well-being, and agency. My work combines rigorous ethics with tools from physics and biology, systems thinking, and design methods to surface hidden failure modes, clarify value tradeoffs, and build measurable, testable pathways from principles to real-world outcomes—especially for people most likely to be harmed when systems fail.
My research develops a scientifically informed paradigm for ethical systems design: a way to model how values, incentives, and power actually behave “on the ground” in complex, unequal worlds—and how to intervene responsibly. I draw on tools and analogies from physics, ecology, and modern mathematics to map ethical dynamics across scales (from individual experience to institutional structure), and I pair that with measurement-minded ethical wayfinding—turning abstract ideals like dignity and flourishing into decision-ready frameworks teams can test, iterate, and improve.
My work is therefore thoroughly multidisciplinary and praxis-oriented. I am always looking for collaborators inside and outside the academy—especially in AI, policy, and design—who are interested in using rigorous theoretical tools to craft concrete solutions to real-world problems. At its best, theorizing can guide and improve practice, and practice can in turn refine and deepen our theorizing, creating upward spirals of mutually reinforcing insight and action. That is the form I aim for my philosophy to take.
I also have a deep passion for information visualization and what it can do to unlock insight and understanding. I'm currently exploring this passion through my multidisciplinary Visualizing Kant Project, which combines philosophy, design, and information visualization to make Kant's philosophical system accessible and exciting to a wider audience—and to experiment with new visual languages that can help us see ethical and AI-related phenomena in clearer, more actionable ways.