Peter Zuk, PhD

Peter Zuk, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his PhD from Rice University in 2019 and subsequently held fellowships at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy and the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. Dr. Zuk examines perennial philosophical questions in the foundations of ethics, the nature of the mind, and the meaning of humanity and humanism, employing a partly historical approach that looks back to how debates about these questions have played out in the Western philosophical canon and beyond to shed light on their contemporary manifestations. These interests inform his applied bioethical interests, which focuses on technologies for neuromodulation (energetic stimulation of the brain), especially the use of deep brain stimulation in movement and psychiatric disorders and brain-implanted devices for vision restoration. He has also recently joined the interdisciplinary conversation about neurorights, such as the rights to mental privacy, to cognitive liberty, and to mental integrity. He is interested in both how these rights apply to neurotechnology development for medical and non-medical applications and how they might be extended to help us reflect on the role that more commonplace digital technologies have come to play in our lives. He predicts that the current scientific revolution in AI will rightly occasion a corresponding humanistic revolution rearticulating a central role for truth, goodness, beauty, and human dignity in individual and collective experience.