Ms Jennifer DeBerardinis

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Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar

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“For science to provide insight about the real world requires the belief that our best scientific theories capture the way nature actually operates.”

Ms Jennifer DeBerardinis, who has just graduated with a BA from Smith College, Massachusetts, has won a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship to go to the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne to further her research into philosophy of science.

Ms DeBerardinis will extend a philosophical model that was developed in Australia to answer questions she has about how we come to understand the world through science. Her work will focus on a philosophical area called dialetheism, which is a view that suggests contradictions can be true. Dialetheism holds the hope of helping to explain how scientists can maintain contradictory theories without believing that the world is full of real contradictions.

“While we commonly think of science as an “either-or” discipline, in which evidence in the form of data points to one conclusion or another, but data rarely point us in one conclusive direction, and conflicting theories abound,” Jennifer said.

Through her research into microbes known as ciliates in the U.S., Jennifer found herself with a problem. Ciliates defy traditional wisdom in the field of genetics by not conforming to the inheritance patterns commonly understood by geneticists. Spurred by this challenge to traditional scientific wisdom, Jennifer became very interested in contradictory scientific theories and how they relate to our intuitive conceptions of true and false

“Given that scientific theories aim to uncover the way the world actually operates and some theories are contradictory, we are left to believe that the universe is an inconsistent place: a disheartening conclusion. Thankfully, dialetheism may be able to help us explain inconsistent theories without believing in an inconsistent world,” Jennifer said.

Jennifer has a BA in Biology and Philosophy from Smith College, Massachusetts. She has won various awards and prizes including a student fellowship with the National Association of Science Writers, an Amgen Scholarship, University of California San Francisco and a STRIDE Scholarship, Smith College. She has conducted research in evolutionary biology (Smith College), molecular biology (University of California San Francisco), and bioengineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In addition to her studies, she has experience as a science journalist. In this capacity, she has written press releases about science research for the University of Massachusetts News Office and press releases for Smith College News Office, as well as writing for local newspapers. In her spare time she enjoys drawing, reading, and travelling.