Two of our fabulous School of Philosophy PhD students, Nicky Drake and Ross Pain, have been awarded a Global Priorities Fellowship from the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) at Oxford. The Global Priorities Fellowship provided by the Forethought Foundation, aims to support promising graduate students and postdocs in contributing to global priorities research, and includes a stipend of GBP 5000. In addition, Nicky was accepted to the GPI’s Early Career Conference Programme (ECCP), which allows PhD students, postdocs, and early-career faculty in economics and philosophy to visit Oxford for 4-weeks in June to work on a project related to global priorities research, and includes travel and accommodation. You can find more information about both the Fellowship and ECCP at https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/eccp/

Nicholas Drake before starting at ANU completed his Masters of philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington and Washington University in St. Louis. At ANU, he is working on his dissertation, “Wellbeing and Public Policy,” which examines the theory and practice of government approaches to promote wellbeing. Nicky’s research interests include wellbeing, public policy, metaethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, and Chinese philosophy. He has published articles about reasons and love, Mill's metaethics, and moral bioenhancement.

Ross Pain is currently working on his thesis on “Cultural, cognitive and social evolution; 2022,” which addresses both first-order questions ("how did language evolve?") and methodological questions ("how do we answer first-order questions?"). He has several publications in his areas of research interest which include the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of archaeology, as well as the history of pragmatism in analytic philosophy (particularly Carnap and Sellars).