Current officers

Alessandra Basso

Alessandra Basso is a philosopher of science interested in economics and the social sciences more broadly. She is a Fellow at the LSE department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method. Before joining LSE, she was Newton International Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science. In Cambridge, she carried out a project on the epistemological foundations of inequality measurement. You can find out more about this project here. Alessandra has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Helsinki, where she was part of the TINT Centre for the Philosophy of Social Science. Before her PhD, she completed a MSc at the London School of Economics.

Cyril Hédoin (co-editor of JEM)

Cyril Hédoin is a full professor of Economics at the Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne. He has a large experience in teaching in economics at all academic levels (bachelor and master degrees), ranging from economic principles, microeconomics (intermediate and advanced), public economics, macroeconomics, history of economics, economics of institutions. His academic research is at the intersection of economics and philosophy, with a particular interests for issues belonging to PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics). He also occasionally writes for non-academic outlets and he blogs at https://cyrilhedoin.substack.com/

Catherine Herfeld

Catherine Herfeld is an assistant professor for Philosophy of the Social Sciences and Social Theory at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is also an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology. Her research interests fall into the fields of philosophy of economics, economic methodology, history of economics, Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS), and empirical philosophy of science. In her work, she mainly brings an &HPS approach to address philosophical and historical questions about economics, such as how model transfer into and from economics into other domains looks like, the nature of rational choice explanations, the history of rational choice theories, the nature of thought experiments in economics, and the status of first principles in economics, among other issues. She is also interested in diversity issues in the field of economic methodology and conducts empirical research on the underrepresentation of women in philosophy.

Andre Hofmeyr

Andre Hofmeyr is a Professor in the School of Economics, and the Director of the Research Unit in Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics (RUBEN), at the University of Cape Town. As an experimental economist, he specializes in decision theory, game theory, experimental economic methodology, health, and structural econometrics.

Jennifer Jhun (treasurer)

Jennifer Jhun is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Duke University, as well as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her main research interests lie in the philosophy of science, especially economics, though she occasionally thinks about issues in other areas such as psychology and physics. These days, she is at work on a project that investigates antitrust from a history and philosophy of science perspective. She co-hosts Smith and Marx walk into a bar: A history of economics podcast (hetpodcast.libsyn.com) and her academic website can be found at www.jenniferjhun.com.

Jaakko Kuorikoski (president)

Jaakko Kuorikoski is professor at the University of Helsinki. He is a naturalistic philosopher of science. His conviction is that it is futile to approach even the most foundational questions in theoretical philosophy without close engagement with the empirical sciences, and that a naturalistic philosophy of science approach is usually methodologically more fruitful than conceptual analysis based on philosophers’ intuitions. He is motivated by problem-solving rather than scholarly exegesis. He is currently the PI of the project Making Data Speak: Towards a Philosophy of Data-Driven Social Science, funded by the Finnish Research Council.

Guilhem Lecouteux (secretary and co-editor of JEM)

Guilhem Lecouteux is Associate Professor of economics at Université Côte d’Azur, and Vice-Dean for international relations of the Graduate School of Economics and Management. His research lies at the intersection of behavioural economics, history of economic thought, and philosophy, and investigates the role of behavioural sciences in the design and justification of public policies. He has published in economics, philosophy, and psychology journals, and has more recently initiated a project in digital health on the prevention of risky behaviours.

Johanna Thoma (outgoing president)

Johanna Thoma is a professor and chair of ethics at the University of Bayreuth philosophy department, where she helps run the department’s flagship Philosophy&Economics programme. Prior to joining Bayreuth in 2023, she was an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2017. Johanna has published widely in economic methodology, decision theory, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of public policy. Her current core research interests are attitudes to risk (their representation and normative significance), the methods of behavioural welfare economics, the science-policy interface, and dynamic and long-term decision making.

Melissa Vergara Fernandez

Melissa Vergara Fernández is postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University’s initiative Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity. Prior to this, she was a Fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy, at Duke University. Her work has focussed on the modelling practices of economics, giving the history of economics a primary role. In her postdoctoral project she is working on the philosophy of science of finance and financial economics. Specifically, she is interested in the ways in which financial economics has characterised financial markets historically and how these have in turn shaped the development of the discipline. On this basis, she is particularly interested in how blockchain technology and the urgency of the energy transition are affecting financial markets and their characterisation. She has taught courses in Economic Methodology, Business Ethics, History of Economic Thought, and Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. Between 2015 and 2019 she coordinated INET’s YSI philosophy of economics working group, where she co-organised several workshops and conferences, some in partnership with INEM.

Magdalena Małecka

Magdalena Małecka is an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University (Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies) and a Docent at the University of Helsinki. She has undertaken research at i.a. Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Stanford University, Columbia University, Central European University, European University Institute, University of California, Berkeley. Magdalena combines insights from history of economic thought, STS and feminist philosophy of science to develop her philosophical perspective on modern economics. She has published on behavioural public policy and behavioural economics, decision theory, values in economics, economics imperialism, law&economics. Her recent research focuses on the ways in which computer has transformed modern economics and on philosophical implications of this transformation.