I was initially trained as a physician-scientist at Charité Medical School/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, receiving both an M.D. and a Ph.D. degree. This path included two years of undergraduate-level education in a pre-med program, and, in my case, an entire academic year dedicated to conducting research in a 'wet lab' environment. I spent this year at Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, investigating the effects of aging on the rejection of heart transplants. I wrote a dissertation on this research, and the main results were published in Circulation.  

My subsequent career in the medical world was for a total of six years evenly split between further experimental research in transplant immunology and clinical work in anatomic pathology as well as nephrology. My research was mainly furthered during a two-year return to Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School as a post-doctoral scholar. This appointment led to a steady stream of publications, for example in journals such as Nature Communications and Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 

As part of my clinical training, I also worked with the Intercomex study group on improving the evaluation of kidney transplant biopsies with the help of new tools made available by advances in molecular biology and machine learning classification. I also collaborated with a Berlin-based health tech start-up to help move AI-based image recognition into diagnostic histopathology. 

Partly overlapping with my medical career, I decided to pursue in earnest other long-standing interests. After two years of propaedeutic language study, I went on to earn both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in theology. This took place between 2018 and 2024, under the guidance of John Behr first at St Vladimir’s Seminary and then at the University of Aberdeen. While focused on deep readings of Greek-speaking theological inquiry in the first seven centuries (Apostolic Fathers, Clement and Origen of Alexandria, Evagrius of Pontus, the Cappadocians, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus), I also studied the related material cultures (e.g., iconography, architecture) and liturgical practices.

My doctoral work eventually delivered a re-reading of one of the field's most intractable and stunning texts, Gregory of Nyssa's De anima et resurrectione, mainly by re-situating it within Platonic/Plotinian traditions of natural philosophy and literary theory. This work is currently under revision for publication as a monograph, and aspects of it have been published in Journal of Theological Studies (with further articles forthcoming in Journal of Early Christian Studies and Studia Patristica).

In 2022, halfway into my doctoral work in theology, I began drawing together my two main interests—the biomedical sciences and the humanities—by joining the program in history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame.

The broad training in philosophy that I received at Notre Dame finally gave me a handle on the perplexing phenomenon of modern and contemporary medicine. From a chiefly historical perspective, I study the intellectual commitments underlying the works of some of the main figures that instituted the watershed reforms of medical education in the US and Canada at the beginning of the 20th century, as for example in a paper on Abraham Flexner published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. From a chiefly systematic perspective, I leverage the arguments of early phenomenological thinkers (principally Husserl, Heidegger, Stein, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty) to think about the issue of biomedical reductionism. Because the latter systematic work, which also forms the subject of my dissertation, is focused around an account of clinical judgment, it directly speaks to a number of questions in medical ethics.

Studying the history and philosophy of science and medicine in Greek-speaking late antiquity at Notre Dame was an important influence on my theological work, in tandem with a rigorous re-appraisal of Platonic traditions of thought in ancient and medieval philosophy. In addition, my engagement with phenomenology in the context of modern philosophy of science and medicine has opened up a number of new avenues of research in my theological work. I am pursuing a long-term project that (by way of an inquiry into Husserlian and Platonic 'ideality') aims to offer a new philosophical reconstruction of ancient theories of allegory and their theological implementation.