Lindley Darden

Lindley Darden (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor of Philosophy and an affiliate in the Department of History and in theBehavior, Evolution, Ecology, and Systematics (BEES) Concentration Area, the Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Genomics (CBBG) Concentration Area, and the Molecular & Cellular Biology (MOCB) of the Biological Sciences Graduate Program (BISI). She is a philosopher of science and a historian of biology. In June 2006, she was a Visiting Professor in the Centre Cavailles for History and Philosophy of Science at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris and in 2008, the Clark-Way-Harrison Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She was President of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, 2001-2003. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science in 1995 and was designated a Distinguished Scholar/Teacher of the University of Maryland for 2006.Her research focuses on reasoning in scientific change. She views the development of scientific knowledge as progressing through iterative cycles of construction, evaluation, and revision of hypotheses. More specifically, she investigates the conceptual aspects of discovery of biological mechanisms from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, such as evolutionary and genetic mechanisms. She also explores the implications of such discoveries for science education, medicine, and environmental policy. Her current area of research is on computational methods for aiding the discovery of molecular biological and disease mechanisms.