The Google PhD Fellowships are highly competitive awards that provide funding for talented students from across the globe to conduct innovative research into areas relevant to computer science and related fields. Jessica is one of the Fellows announced in 2025, whose research will contribute to advancing scientific discovery.
We got in touch with Jessica to find out more about her research.
What is your research about?
Realising the benefits of AI across society necessitates addressing its ethical implications, understood as what is morally good or right. Many ethical concerns are multi-agent in nature, involving one party’s concern for another, which frames multi-agent systems (MAS, collections of interacting agents) as an appropriate setting to examine the ethical implications of AI. To advance ethical decision-making in MAS, my work operationalises normative ethics – the philosophical study of morality – to support decision-makers with interdisciplinary insights and evaluative judgements.
What are you excited for during your Fellowship?
During the Fellowship, I am excited to pursue my final PhD research question, which will examine how normative ethics can facilitate making explicit the underlying ethical posture of MAS and support stakeholders in interpreting and assessing the system. Ethical principles convey an explanatory linguistic structure for morality, providing an alternate lens through which to view fairness issues and encouraging us to ask the right questions. Ascertaining the alignment of a system to particular ethical principles strengthens interpretability, crucial for a system to be comprehensible to humans.
Where are you hoping your research will take you in the future?
As autonomous agents and MAS are increasingly adopted across many sectors in society, with material impacts on peoples' everyday lives, the importance of embedding well thought-out ethical considerations into systems and developing informed policy recommendations is significant. This year, I am looking forward to translating my research into real-world applications by participating in policy exploration research into pressing ethical issues such as environmental robotics and the use of persistent identifiers with generative AI.
In celebration of the awards, Google.org has shared the news on their official blog, The Keyword, and released the following statement:
"Google has announced the recipients of the 2025 Global Google PhD Fellowships. These fellowships recognize outstanding graduate students who are conducting exceptional and innovative research in computer science and related fields, specifically focusing on candidates who seek to influence the future of technology. The program provides vital direct financial support for their PhD pursuits and connects each Fellow with a dedicated Google Research Mentor, reinforcing our commitment to nurturing the academic community. We are excited to welcome this global cohort and look forward to partnering with them as they continue to become leaders in their respective areas.”
The Bristol Doctoral College would like to thank Jessica’s supervisor Dr Nirav Ajmeri, Professor Mike Fraser, the review panel and our colleagues in the pre-award team for their invaluable support throughout the application process.
Warmest congratulations to Jessica on this well-deserved achievement!
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