Dr. Fehr is currently working on three research projects.

ISU ADVANCE
ISU ADVANCE is a program designed to promote the retention and advancement of women and under-represented minority faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Dr. Fehr is a co-Principal Investigator for this project, for which she designs and conducts diversity training, studies workplace equity, and contributes to a project designed to foster supportive and respectful workplace cultures.

Feminist epistemology: How diversity promotes excellence

There is a turn in feminist philosophy toward looking at communities rather than individuals as being the primary creators of scientific knowledge. The general theme of this work is that diversity promotes excellence. Many influential feminist philosophers have argued that communities whose membership is heterogeneous in terms of gender, race and socioeconomic background, as well as scientific background, have the capacity to produce science that is more rigorous than more homogeneous communities. Dr. Fehr applies research in social psychology and sociology to argue that heterogeneous communities can only reap the benefits of diversity if they develop work climates and cultures that value that diversity.

Biological pluralism and pragmatic mechanism

Anyone who has taken something apart in an attempt figure out how it works is trying to create what philosophers and scientists refer to as a mechanistic explanation. According to a mechanistic view of explanation, scientists explain a phenomenon by describing how it works or how it came to be. A mechanistic account of explanation can lead to the view that there should only be one correct explanation for a given phenomenon. After all, if you are explaining one thing with one set of parts or one history, then there ought to be a single correct description or explanation of the functioning or origins of that thing. However, biology is rife with explanatory pluralism: There are many biological phenomena, such as the evolution of sex, that not only admit to, but seem to require, multiple explanations. Dr. Fehr develops a view, Pragmatic Mechanism, which ameliorates this conflict between pluralism and mechanism by demonstrating that explanations are descriptions of mechanisms that are consistent with the research traditions and scientific values of a given research community and that different communities can have different research traditions and different sets of values.

Curriculum Vita