Rate My Professor Michael Weisberg

Michael Weisberg is the Bess W. Heyman President's Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has served since 2003, progressing from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor in 2009 and full Professor in 2015. He holds additional leadership roles as Deputy Director of Perry World House, Director of the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance, Editor-in-Chief of Biology and Philosophy, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Weisberg affiliates with the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Physical Anthropology Section at the Penn Museum. His academic background includes a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Philosophy with highest distinction from the University of California, San Diego in 1999, an M.A. in Philosophy in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2003 from Stanford University, supported by a National Science Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellowship from 1999 to 2003. He received the Stanford University Centennial Teaching Award in 2002.

Weisberg's research specializes in philosophy of science, focusing on modeling, idealization, robustness analysis, and methodological issues in the life and social sciences, alongside philosophy of biology, philosophy of chemistry, public understanding of science, and global climate policy. He authored Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-authored Galápagos: Life in Motion (Princeton University Press, 2018). Key publications include 'Three Kinds of Idealization' (The Journal of Philosophy, 2007), 'Robustness Analysis' (Philosophy of Science, 2006), 'Who is a Modeler?' (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2007), and 'Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor' (Philosophy of Science, 2009). Weisberg has secured multiple National Science Foundation grants, including STS-1557138 (2016-2019 and 2020-2022) and SES-0957189 (2010-2013). As a climate diplomat, he advises Jamaica's UN representative and Fiji and Palau at COP negotiations, contributed to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, and advanced the 'mosaic of solutions' for climate loss and damage, influencing outcomes at COP27 and COP28. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.