Professor Rachel Katharine Sterken is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at HKU. Her research centres on philosophy of language and connects to a broad range of issues in linguistics (semantics, pragmatics), metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, social and political philosophy, developmental and social psychology, ethics, philosophical methodology, epistemology and philosophy of technology. 

She is currently the principal investigator of the project Meaning and Communication in the Information Age which is funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2020-2024). Her collaborators on the project are Jessica Pepp (Uppsala), Eliot Michaelson (KCL) and Fintan Mallory (Oslo). The project looks at how the nature of linguistic meaning and communication have changed as a result of advances in information technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR).

Professor Sterken is also the co-organiser of ConceptLab Hong Kong. ConceptLab Hong Kong fosters research on conceptual engineering/ethics by bringing together researchers from around the globe for seminars and focused collaborative projects. Previously, she was co-director of the Norwegian Research Council funded research centre ConceptLab at the University of Oslo (with Herman Cappelen, Oystein Linnebo and Camilla Serck-Hanssen).