William Cochran
William Cochran is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wake Forest University. He holds an affiliation with the Program for Leadership & Character at WFU as well. Prior to joining Wake Forest, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy with the Embedded EthiCS Program @ Harvard University.
He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 2020, specializing in Aristotle’s theory of moral education. His dissertation reconstructs Aristotle’s notion of teaching and uses it to settle debates in Aristotle’s ethics, specifically concerning the development of the virtues of character and practical wisdom, and to solve a problem for Neo-Aristotelian educational theory. He now aims to bring lessons from Aristotelian moral education to bear on the ethics of technology. How can we live well with emerging technologies? How can we best prepare tomorrow’s computer scientists to be ethical leaders in their field? These are questions that currently animate his thinking.
To relax, he enjoys watching movies with his wife and two daughters. On weekends, he and his family like to seek out new trails to hike in North Carolina with their dog, Winston.
