Assistant Professor of Biomedical Ethics Research, Mayo Clinic   Advancing understanding of the human virome (all viruses that live in and on us) is a national scientific priority. Commensal relationships with viruses prompt questions of what it means to be human and healthy, shifting with new understandings of our complex cohabitation with the most abundant … Read more

President and CEO, The Hastings Center Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Professor, University of Montréal Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, is the President and CEO of The Hastings Center, an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute that is among the most prestigious bioethics and health policy institutes in the world. Ravitsky joins … Read more

        The All of Us Research Program, a keystone of the Precision Medicine Initiative, aims to assemble a cohort of one million or more people to accelerate research and improve health. Central to the program’s aims is ensuring that the cohort is representative of the diversity of those living in the United … Read more

As biomedical research generates ever-growing requirements for large sample sizes, it has increasingly depended on biorepositories to provide biosamples and data. These large collections decrease the time and expense required to answer important research questions, however, a single biorepository is often inadequate. As big data questions have come to play a central role in medical … Read more

Wylie Burke, MD, PhD is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington, Adjunct Professor of Medicine (Medical Genetics). Her work focuses on the ethical and policy implications of genetic information in research and health care. She co-directs the Northwest-Alaska Pharmacogenomics Research Network, a research partnership involving … Read more

Digital technologies are changing how people are recruited to research and raising new ethical, practical, and social considerations. Informed consent practices are also affected, and demanding fresh scrutiny. This presentation considers some of the implications of digitizing informed consent from the perspective of a critical bioethicist who is also an NIH-funded “developer” of a digital … Read more

In early 2017, just prior to the change in administration, the 18 federal agencies that share the “Common Rule” that governs human subjects research issued new regulations. This seminar will offer a behind-the-scenes look at the 6-year rulemaking process, and review the major changes that are coming for IRBs and investigators. Daniel Nelson, JD,  is … Read more

As translational researchers turn to electronic information sources for clinical research recruitment, they are increasingly using on-line communication tools to educate potential participants and document their consent. How can we prevent this from reducing informed consent to the equivalent of a software licensing acceptance check box? John Wilbanks, PhD, is the Chief Commons Officer at … Read more

Looking at human and animal experimentation together revealed intersections and differences that were not immediately evident. This talk will look at some of the changes in policy, science, and public perceptions since Experimenting with Humans and Animals appeared at the beginning of this century, and how the landscape of experimentation has also changed. Anita Guerrini, PhD, is Horning Professor in the … Read more

Gail E. Henderson, PhD, is professor of Social Medicine in the School of Medicine, and Director of the UNC Center for Genomics and Society. She was Chair of Social Medicine from 2009 to 2015, and co-Director of the Center for AIDS Research International Core from 2004 to 2014.  Her teaching and research interests include global … Read more