Rate My Professor Dan Hicks

Dan Hicks is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Merced, with affiliate appointments in the Public Health Graduate Group and the Health Sciences Research Institute. Hicks earned a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 2012, an MS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003, and a BS in Mathematics and Politics and Government from the University of Puget Sound in 2002. Career history includes joining UC Merced as Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences in 2019, promotion to Associate Professor in 2023, and appointment as Department Chair in 2024. Prior positions encompass Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Davis Data Science Initiative from 2017 to 2019; AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow hosted by the Environmental Protection Agency Chemical Safety for Sustainability Program in 2015-2016 and the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative in 2016-2017; Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Ontario Rotman Institute of Philosophy from 2013 to 2015; and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters and Department of Philosophy from 2012 to 2013.

Hicks specializes in philosophy of science, philosophy and data science, and science policy, with research focused on public scientific controversies particularly in environmental public health, trust in science, the role of science in democracy, ethical and political values in science, bibliometrics, statistics in scientific practice, data ethics, and computational social science methods. Key publications include 'A new direction for science and values' (2014, 152 citations), 'The Virtues of Scientific Practice: MacIntyre, Virtue Ethics, and the Historiography of Science' co-authored with T.A. Stapleford (2016, 73 citations), 'Open science, the replication crisis, and environmental public health' (2023, 67 citations), 'Legitimizing Values in Regulatory Science' co-authored with M. Fernández Pinto (2019, 55 citations), and 'Scientific Controversies as Proxy Politics' (2017, 36 citations). Hicks's work has been cited over 769 times according to Google Scholar. Service contributions include membership on the University of California Academic Senate Merced Division Committee on Academic Planning and Resource Allocation since 2024, chair of the UC Merced School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts Curriculum Committee in Fall 2022, and program committee roles for the Philosophy of Science Association.