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Alexander TolbertAssistant Professor | QTM

Biography

Alexander Tolbert is a former college basketball player turned philosopher who is currently serving as a Postdoctoral Researcher here at Emory before accepting Assistant Professorship in August of 2024. His work is particularly focused on the intersection of race, technology, and AI ethics, with contributions to social and political philosophy. Alex's academic journey is marked by an interdisciplinary pursuit of knowledge with his technical expertise spanning a wide range of areas, including multicalibration, proximal causal inference, decision-theoretic causality, and the foundational elements of machine learning theory. He also has a keen interest in modeling bias and noise. In his philosophical work, Dr. Tolbert explores the complexities of causation, inductive inference, and moral psychology. He also addresses pressing societal issues such as racism, bias, and inequality and delves into topics like minimax fairness and reparations. 

Education

  • Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, 2023
  • M.A., Statistics, University of Pennsylvania, 2022
  • M.S., Biochemistry, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2019
  • M.A., Philosophy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2019
  • B.S., Biology, University of Mobile, 2013

Research

Alexander Tolbert's fundamental interests are normative questions about equity, just social structure, and discrimination, particularly racial discrimination. He prefers formulating issues and finding proposed solutions in ways that have clear policy implications. His fundamental methodology is to seek to put aspects of those questions into frameworks to which various formal or empirical methods can be applied, to assess the results of such applications, and where possible, contribute to improvements. Alex's interest in formal techniques ranges over topics in machine learning, causal inference, algorithmic fairness, computational social science and economics, and algorithmic game theory. He uses his training in social and political philosophy to try to inform and criticize the design of algorithms and models in the attempt to embed social values such as fairness and to avoid harms such as discrimination and bias.
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