U of U Philosophy Professor Invited for Second Term as Senior Fellow at SOCRATES Center for Advanced Study 

Joyce Havstad, associate professor of philosophy, has been honored with a rare second invitation to serve as a senior visiting fellow at SOCRATES, a research center for the philosophy of science at Leibniz University Hannover.

SOCRATES is a center for advanced studies, funded by a four-year grant from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG, a national agency that supports both science and the humanities) to assemble a working group of internationally renowned experts in public trust in science. The center is a forum for work around social credibility and trustworthiness of expert knowledge and science-based information. Over the first four years, scholars at SOCRATES have collectively produced 177 publications and presentations based on their collaborative efforts.

Cynthia Stark, chair of the Department of Philosophy, congratulates Havstad, saying, “We are fortunate to have such an internationally renowned scholar in our department.  Her accomplishments raise the profile of the department and the college enabling us to recruit philosophy majors, graduate students and visiting scholars. Professor Havstad’s research and graduate student mentorship contribute greatly to our department’s widely recognized strength in the philosophy of science.”

Havstad, who was an invited senior fellow previously during the 2024-2025 academic year, has been invited to return as one of the foremost global authorities on the philosophy of science. Her research has spanned a wide range of topics, including animal ethics, climate science and policy, inductive risk, macroevolution, natural kinds, and more.

Her current research focuses on how society understands the conditions for “good” science – whether it is a matter of the individual character of scientists, or larger systems and institutional rewards that create guardrails to produce high-quality, reliable science. Her goal is to develop alternative social norms that could reduce episodes of scientific dysfunction and raise public confidence in science overall.

Describing her first fellowship at SOCRATES, Havstad talks about the excitement of being in a place where global intellectual cross-pollination allows the discipline to grow far more rapidly than the usual pace of academia. “I loved being at the Center – they’ve created a really magical environment there. It’s super stimulating; I can already see the way the field is advancing as a result of all of us coalescing in the same place,” she says.

Havstad’s second fellowship will run from April 1st to July 31st, during which she will be working on a book about scientific method choice and collaborating with other senior and junior scholars to help the center pass their external site review and set SOCRATES up for a successful grant renewal application. “I’m really honored,” says Havstad, “it’s deeply gratifying to have a career’s worth of work recognized this way, with this sort of opportunity.”

The research she will be doing with her fellow collaborators at SOCRATES has high stakes for the world we are experiencing today. Issues of misinformation, science illiteracy, and digital noise can wreak havoc on individuals’ ability to assess, understand, and make decisions informed by science. On a broader level, trust in science impacts everything from the effectiveness of local public health campaigns to international policy around climate change.

“Public trust in science is something that matters today. Discerning when to trust science, who's bringing you the trustworthy science when there are lots of people in the marketplace of ideas telling you that they've got the trustworthy science or expert-based information - these are important issues,” Havstad explains, continuing, “We need to develop better indications of trustworthiness. To have a community of scholars working on this project with such high levels of dedication - it's an honor to be a part of it.”