Joanna Diane Caytas

Welcome to my digital incarnation

My current anchorages and homesteads are Columbia University and the University of Oxford.

My research interests most prominently include foundational issues in mathematics and logic on the one hand, and in law and social sciences on the other. Since some time, I have enjoyed thinking about the nature and limitations of rules and rule-making, their role in complex self-organizing systems, and models of reality as analytical tools. I get excited about science diplomacy and law as they relate to disruptive and visionary technology, but also about emergent theories in quantum cognition, ignorance, paraconsistent logic, artificial intelligence, and robotics  influencing synthetic biology. I enjoy critical thought and remedial proposals for the systemic roots of social ills that certain fundamental axioms, such as individual culpability, division of labor and responsibility, transaction costs, and threshold levels of proof, fail to address, much less adapt to changed realities in timely, appropriate and evolutionary ways. Not to forget musings about numerous manifestations of spin, distortion, half-truths and misleading projections of evidence; in brief, the shortcomings in our collective ability to discern fact from fiction with some reliability. Columbia scholars who have been enduring inspirations include Jonathan R. Cole, Stuart Firestein, Richard Hamilton, Mikhail Khovanov, Dusa McDuff, and Achille Varzi.

In summer 2013 I completed a large research project funded, inter alia, by the Council on Advanced Value Economics, on the uses and broader effects of collateral. Since October 2013, influenced by a start-up in which I was involved, I began post-graduate work in nanotechnology at the University of Oxford under the direction of my dissertation supervisor, Peter Dobson, OBE and Christiane Norenberg. They as well as Robert Carlisle retooled my thinking about science and technology policy, innovation and entrepreneurship in remarkable ways.

In August of 2014 I returned to Columbia to read law in all its numerous facets. There, the significance of patterns, different concepts of security, transactional mechanics and logistics, infrastructure projects, resources, finance and technology, interest me most in practical terms. Work for the federal judiciary intrigued me as it exposed layers upon layers of conflicts of interest and broad variety of methods and angles for evaluating controversies. One of my next hopes is to sometime continue that experience – it is like Pilates for the mind, epistemology in action. The following year, I enjoyed an immensely rewarding summer addressing cutting-edge issues in corporate and international taxation of complex financial structures in private practice, and decided to make it the focus of advanced educational endeavors as well as the primary focus of my work. Alex Raskolnikov challenged and guided me to combine mathematical and quantitative aspects with behavioral analysis and economics to arrive at coherent critical analysis of tax policy and its practical implementation.
 
I seek constructive balance between imaginative lawyering and tangible outcome, the process of creation and of making things happen. It is not so much change I pursue as it is realization, implementation, and transition from vision to result. My background in a number of European and Asian social and business cultures leads me to seek out transnational, market-driven opportunities in a high-voltage professional environment. Opportunities for applying ideas attract me most: I served as research assistant to Anu Bradford on a multi-year international antitrust project and assisted with legal research and drafting for a successful federal appeal of a capital habeas corpus denial by Bernard Harcourt.