Thomas M. Powers, PhD

Biography

Dr Thomas M. Powers is Associate Professor of Philosophy and founding Director of the Center for Science, Ethics & Public Policy at the University of Delaware in Newark. He holds a BA in philosophy from the College of William and Mary and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. His earlier appointments include an NSF research fellowship at the University of Virginia and teaching in philosophy and computer engineering at Santa Clara University. His scholarship examines machine ethics, computer agency, responsibility, human-robot interaction and the use of non-monotonic reasoning in ethical deliberation. Publications include Prospects for a Kantian Machine and Incremental Machine Ethics, alongside a co-authored chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI. He serves as a subject editor for Ethics and Information Technology at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is Senior Personnel at the NSF AI Institute for Human-AI Cooperation, which studies human-AI collaboration in rehabilitation. His recent collaborative work includes a 2026 paper on human-AI cooperation in healthcare and rehabilitation.