ELENA POPA

Elena Popa

Ramón y Cajal Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Philosophy of Science, University of Seville, Spain

Positions held

2026-2027 visiting researcher(s)

Biography

Elena Popa is Ramón y Cajal fellow at the University of Seville, Spain. She holds a PhD from Central European University, Budapest, Hungary with a thesis on manipulationist approaches to causality. She has held teaching positions in several countries in Asia and has completed a Marie Curie COFUND fellowship at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. She has developed research programs around as causality and causal reasoning, values in science (including trust, science and democracy, pluralism) and philosophy of medicine (particularly public health and psychiatry). Her current project on causality and social determinants of health explores how different concepts of causality can be used to conceptualize health effects of social variables and their further use in ethical and broadly normative context. She has published articles in journals such as Philosophy Compass, Synthese, or Topoi and book chapters in volumes with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Research areas: general philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of psychology, applied ethics

Website

epopa@us.es

Publications:

  • Popa, E., & Zameska, J. (2025). Causal pluralism and public health ethics trade‐offs: a toolkit for acting on social determinants of health. Philosophy Compass, 20(11), e70064.
  • Popa, E. (2025). Medical cosmopolitanism. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine, 196.
  • Popa, E. (2024). Just pluralism: thinking about concepts of mental disorder in global context. Synthese, 204(3), 83.
  • Popa, E. (2024). Values in public health: an argument from trust. Synthese, 203(6), 200.
  • Popa, E. (2023). Loneliness as cause. Topoi, 42(5), 1175-1184.
  • Popa, E. (2021). Human goals are constitutive of agency in artificial intelligence (AI). Philosophy & Technology, 34(4), 1731-1750.