We are very happy to welcome our new Writing-up Fellow Liberty Severs. Liberty is a philosopher and cognitive scientist. She received her BA in Philosophy from the University of London, and holds a MA in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science from the University of Birmingham and an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Sussex. She is currently pursuing her PhD degree from the University of Lisbon at the Faculty of Sciences under the supervision of Dr. Davide Vecchi, Dr. Inês Hipólito, and Prof. Pedro Freitas. Her research interest lies in understanding the concept of agency and how it can be studied across diverse systems and scales.

During her fellowship at the KLI from 1st Oct 2025 - 31st March 2026, Liberty will be working on her project, “Beyond Control: Reinforcement Learning and the Operational Foundations of Agency” which aims to combine the paradigm of reinforcement learning (RL) with comparative methods, in order to assess the diversity of agenthood, and how various functions of agency can be organised and constrained in different ways to support adaptive behaviour.

In addition to her research work, Liberty is a co-founder and associate researcher at non-neural cognition research (NnCR), a member of the PPI group for Interoception and Mental Health (University of Surrey), and programme chair for the International Society of the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM). She is also interested in ecology and the arts, and experiencing new things, places, and food. 

Here’s wishing Liberty a wonderful time at the KLI and in Austria.