Bio

I was born in Drammen, Norway in 1974, which is the only time I ever visited until 2012. If people ask where I’m from, I don’t really know what to say. I have lived in a number of places. My dialect is from the south-east of Norway but Tromsø feels like my home town, since I lived there from 1991 to 2006 with only a few exceptions. I now live and work in Ås, a short train ride from Oslo.

Studies

I started my Philosophy undergraduate studies in Tromsø in 1993, before studying some Latin in Oslo and Logic in Bergen. After this I moved back to Tromsø to do my graduate studies in Philosophy and in 1999 I got my Cand. Philol. degree. My dissertation was on the logic of conditionals, and I took this research further in my doctorate dissertation. I spent 2002 in Vancouver, at Simon Fraser University, and in 2005 I defended my dissertation ‘Our Conditional World – A critique of the formal logical approach’ in Tromsø. This work was funded by the Research Council of Norway (NFR) and their FRIPRO funding scheme (for independent basic research within the humanities, FRIHUM).

Post-studies

After this I got a 3 year postdoctoral research grant, also from NFR’s FRIPRO funding scheme. I spent two years at the University of Nottingham, working with Professor Stephen Mumford on dispositions and causation from 2007 to 2009. Together we developed a new theory of causation. After Nottingham, I got funding from FRIPRO NFR for a 4-year research project, Causation in Science (CauSci), hosted by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) from January 2011. In May 2014 I became Research Fellow at HH NMBU. In December 2014 my new research project, Causation, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences (CauseHealth), got funded by FRIPRO and started up in the spring 2015 at NMBU. In 2018, Elena Rocca and I established NMBU CAPS – Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science. In October 2018, we entered a 3 year collaboration agreement with WHO’s Uppsala Monitoring Centre for drug safety, CauseHealth Risk and Safety. From 2022, I’m employed in two different faculties at NMBU: HH and MINA.