Research Interests
My philosophical research is at the intersection of the Philosophy of Science, Law, Applied Ethics, and Social Philosophy. I am concerned about the far-reaching effects of neuroscience and psychiatry, particularly in cases where this data may be misapplied (especially in a court of law). Further, I am interested in developing scholarship in the philosophical analysis of the field of forensic science.
Publications
Petrozzo, K. (2024). Mental illness as a life sentence: The (mis)treatment of individuals with psychiatric diagnoses in the courtroom. In A. Cantú, E. Maisel, & C. Ruby (Eds.), Institutionalized Madness: The Interplay of Psychiatry and Society’s Institutions (pp. 136–152). Ethics Press.
Santana, C., Petrozzo, K. & Perkins, T.J. (2024). Whose Anthropocene?: a data-driven look at the prospects for collaboration between natural science, social science, and the humanities. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, fqae004. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqae004
Santana, C., Smith, A.C., Petrozzo, K., & Halm, D. (2022). “The Irrationality of Stand Your Ground: Game Theory on Self-Defense.” Moral Philosophy and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1515/mopp-2022-0007
Petrozzo, K. (2017). "Free Will and Responsibility in the Neuroscientific Age." compos mentis: Undergraduate Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics, 5 (2): 83–100.
Reviews and Commentaries
Petrozzo, Kathryn (2024). The Role of Law Enforcement in Coercive Psychiatric Interventions. American Journal of Bioethics, 24(12), 115-116.
Petrozzo, K. (2023). Excited Delirium: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Police Brutality. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 30 (4), 357-359.
Public-Facing Writing
“Omelas Escape Room: Energizing the Classroom.” January 2025. Blog of the APA, American Philosophical Association.
“Interrogating the brain on trial: neuroscience, ethics, and the law.” August 2022. Policywise blog, Baylor College of Medicine Health Policy.
Awards
My paper "‘Mental Health Advance Directives in Psychiatry: Cultivating Autonomy in Mature Pediatric Patients" won the Academic Essay Contest held by the International Neuroethics Society (2023).
My paper "Less Than Whole: Implications of Reduced Agency" received an honorable mention for the Karl Jaspers Award from the Association for the Advancement of Psychiatry and Philosophy (2023).
I was selected to be 1 of 12 Summer 2022 Research Interns at the Baylor Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy out of around 600 applicants. I spent my internship working on the BRAINShare Project, which is a branch under the larger NIH Brain Initiative, focusing on innovation in neuroscience research. The BRAINShare Project is focused on data sharing in the neurosciences by engaging stakeholders to identify challenges and concerns related to sharing brain data. The aim is to generate strategies to improve data sharing and inform policy decisions surrounding the use of neuroscience data.
My involvement entailed assisting with generating challenge statements for further interviews, analyzing past data collected through interviews, and literature search focusing on a way to coalesce concerns that key stakeholders and researchers have when it comes to data sharing.
I am also currently working on a draft with my mentors on my research aimed at clinicians and researchers working with brain data.