I am an incoming postdoctoral researcher at NYU, affiliated with the Center for Mind, Brain, & Consciousness (fall of 2026). 

I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics (LSE) in the summer of 2026, under the supervision of Jonathan Birch and Alexandria Boyle.

I specialize in philosophy of mind, cognition, and science, with a focus on artificial and non-human animal minds. I taught AI & Data Ethics, and Mind & Metaphysics at LSE.

 

I am interested in different kinds of intelligent, cognitive, and conscious systems that exist in nature and how the current approaches to building AI agents relate to or diverge from biological intelligence(s).

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In 2024, I was part of a collaborative research project between LSE and Google, investigating whether LLMs can make trade-offs involving granular representations of affect states (stipulated pain and pleasure), inspired by a paradigm from the animal sentience literature.

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In 2025, I collaborated with Marta Halina and Martyna Stachaczyk at the HPS Cambridge, investigating the evolutionary and developmental origin processes enabling biological organisms to successfully exploit causal structures of their environments. We argue that current leading approaches to causal learning in humans, animals and AI lack an explanation of and agent's ability to experience themselves as causally embedded in complex, noisy environments, and instead begin with the agent already capable of instrumental causal interaction with the world to further explain causal learning abilities.

 

I write on introspection in LLMs, on epistemology of AI in science, and investigated competing explanations of intelligent behavior and cognitive organization in Portia jumping spiders.

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Please visit my Research page for more information on my past and current research. 

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You can find my resume here: CV

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Email: d.zakharova1 [at] lse ac uk

Bluesky: @dzakharova.bsky.social