Sherry Kao is an associate teaching professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. She specializes in normative and applied ethics. Besides tracing its historical development in Western philosophical tradition (esp. Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant), she also studies how other cultures understand human flourishing. She examines related topics such as autonomy, aspiration, hope, and despair, in the contexts of theoretical, biomedical, and environmental ethics. One of her works in this area is an analysis of a prominent public health policy proposal during the early COVID-19 pandemic, published as a commentary in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The Socratic approach to philosophy has ignited and sustained her passion for teaching. She loves to teach topics where human flourishing and morality intersect in daily life.

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