My research revolves around questions to do with the role that models, applied mathematics, and laws play in the process of scientific inquiry: What role do laws play in scientific practice? How do models help us to provide explanations of various patterns we observe? How should we understand the application of mathematics to the empirical world? Although these questions are often tackled separately in the philosophical literature, I think they are connected in deep and important ways. Paying attention to these connections allows us to recognise important details about the methodology of science that have otherwise escaped philosophical notice.

The following are at various stages of 'in progress'. Email me if you'd like to see a draft. Comments are more than welcome!

Adequacy-for-Purpose in Minimal Models.
Building on recent work by Wendy Parker, I put forward and defend some general criteria for when minimal models are adequate for a broad range of purposes.

The Different Explanatory Roles of Scientific Laws
I argue that laws play a variety of explanatory roles in scientific practice, and substantiate this by identifying at least two distinct ones.

Fundamental Laws and the Methodology of Science (with Gabrielle Kerbel)
We argue that the notion of fundamental law that appears in physics is highly disunified, and that it is not clear it is fit for the kind of metaphysical purposes to which it is often put.

Minimalism about Laws (with Tyler Hildebrand)
We develop a view, called minimalism about laws, according to which the connection between methodological and metaphysical questions about laws is more complicated than some realise.

What is an Instance of a Law of Nature?
I argue that the notion of an ‘instance of a law’ familiar from schemata like All Fs are Gs is not particularly helpful when it comes to thinking about concrete scientific cases. 

What role do laws of nature play in the process of scientific inquiry? In answering this question, philosophers have tended to focus on a handful of predictive and explanatory roles with which laws have been traditionally associated. I argue that this traditional focus overlooks an important fact about scientific practice: before they can be of any predictive or explanatory use, laws must often be supplemented by a wide variety of modelling ingredients, such as material parameters, boundary conditions, auxiliary models, and so on – what I call their supporting casts. As a result,many accounts of laws have trouble conferring lawhood on the kinds of generalisations and principles worth calling laws without also conferring it on those features that play a merely supporting role. I argue that the key to avoiding this problem lies in recognising the important role that laws play in helping us to coordinate the various different kinds of information we must make use of in our attempts to model some system and thus explain or predict its behaviour. In addition to contributing to a more complete philosophical picture of scientific methodology surrounding laws, my account of this coordinating role also helps us to identify several distinct explanatory and predictive roles that laws play in scientific practice.