Lorenzo Manuali
PhD Student in Philosophy
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor
Dear donors to the Institute for Humane Studies,
I wanted to personally write to thank you for donating to IHS. I’m a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Michigan who studies addiction, technology, democratic theory, and their intersections.
Your donations to IHS enabled possibilities to further my research that I didn’t think were possible.
IHS invited me to present two projects of mine at workshops that they ran this summer. At one, I presented a project on behavioral addiction and social media. At another, I presented a co-authored project on LLMs (large language models) and democratization. This new initiative gave me great feedback and allowed me to develop the projects further.
My IHS-funded project regarding LLMs and democratization has also received generous support from IHS. Through their short-term residency fellowship, I’ve received funds to plan to meet my co-author on the project. He is a tenured professor at the Australian National University and is very well respected in my field (philosophy), and I have never had a substantive in-person conversation with him before. With funding to visit ANU for a month, we’ll be able to meet and make more progress on the project.
These opportunities have impacted my research immensely. I’m incredibly grateful for them. They wouldn’t be possible without your support.
My research (both concerning technology and addiction) is heavily empirical. I was recently accepted to a joint program between my university and the NIH in which one receives additional training in the neuroscience of addiction. The grant that was offered was substantial, but my department could not cover the rest. With the help of IHS funding, I am able to participate in the program this fall. During the course of this program, I’ll be able to take more classes on the neuroscience of addiction and meet with NIH-funded researchers and mentors within my university about my IHS-funded project (concerning behavioral addiction and social media) and professionalization. I would have also been teaching, so this program and IHS’s generous support is giving me more time to pursue my research.
Beyond these opportunities, every IHS event I have attended has been full of people who are engaging, kind, and extremely helpful in making suggestions regarding my own work. It’s particularly astounding that this persists even when researchers don’t come from the same field. Political scientists have offered some of the best suggestions concerning my work.
IHS is the best research community I’ve found in my PhD studies so far. You are supporting a wonderful community helping researchers on the cutting edge develop connections that will advance the future of their fields.
Again, thank you very much. It means a lot to me personally that you are supporting such a wonderful community.
Thank you,
Lorenzo Manuali
PhD Student in Philosophy
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor
