Hanna Pickard, DPhil

Hanna Pickard is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics cross-appointed to the William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy  and the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and affiliated with the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.  Prior to joining Hopkins, she held a Chair in Philosophy of Psychology at the University of Birmingham U.K. and was a Visiting Research Scholar to Princeton University’s Program in Cognitive Science (2017-2019). She was also a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford (1997-2017) and a Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Clinical Research Fellow (2010-2015).

She specializes in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology and clinical ethics. As well as being an analytic philosopher, Dr. Pickard worked for a decade at The Oxfordshire Complex Needs Service, a NHS specialist service for people with personality disorders and complex needs. Her research is interdisciplinary: she tends to explore  philosophical questions that arise out of clinical practice and related science, often in connection with criminal and mental health law and policy. She works on a wide range of topics, including the nature of mental disorders, delusions, agency, character, the emotions, self-harm, violence, placebos, therapeutic relationships, decision-making capacity, the self and social identity, and attitudes towards mental disorder and crime.

She currently has two central research projects: Responsibility without Blame and Addiction.