Rate My Professor Patrick McGivern

Patrick McGivern is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong's School of Humanities and Social Inquiry. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Alberta, completed in 2005. Since joining the University of Wollongong in 2009, McGivern has developed a distinguished research profile centered on Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Cognition, and Philosophy of Medicine. Within Philosophy of Science, his work emphasizes the role of scale in scientific explanation and modelling, exploring issues of emergence, reduction, and inter-theoretic relations. In Philosophy of Cognition, he investigates how cognitive features like agency and self-preservation vary across different scales. His contributions to Philosophy of Medicine include examinations of concepts of health and disease, particularly in the context of emerging biotechnologies.

McGivern's scholarly output includes the book Emergence (2018), which provides a philosophical assessment of emergence. Key publications feature 'Hierarchies and levels of reality' (co-authored with Alexander Rueger), 'Fundamentality, Scale, and the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect' (with Elay Shech), and 'Active materials: minimal models of cognition?' (2019). Recent interdisciplinary work addresses ethical dimensions of advanced biomedical technologies, such as 'Integrating neural organoids and AI: increasing the risk of artificial consciousness or medical malpractice?' (2026, with Alexander R. Harris, Kyle C. A. Wedgwood, and Frederic Gilbert), 'A review of ethical and regulatory issues in the clinical application of stem cell-derived tissue constructs' (2023, with Alexander R. Harris and Frederic Gilbert), 'Defining Biomarkers in Stem Cell-Derived Tissue Constructs for Drug and Disease Screening' (2024), and 'Modeling Emergent Properties in the Brain Using Tissue Models to Investigate Neurodegenerative Disease' (with Lezanne Ooi). His research has accumulated over 320 citations on Google Scholar, influencing discussions on multi-scale modelling, emergence, and agency in science and cognition. McGivern also engages in collaborative projects on collective intelligence and resilient communities at the University of Wollongong.