Hello! I am a bioethicist focusing on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of Genetics and Genomics (ELSI). The focus of my work is navigating ethical issues that arise in the application of genomic screening. I used to work in the genetics industry; I am convinced of the need for careful reflection and gathering of evidence to help ensure the upsides of genomics are realized, hence my career redirection towards ELSI work. You can read more on my publications page.

I am currently an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I am working on a project entitled “Identifying strategies to reveal genetic results over the lifespan”, funded by a R00 award from the NHGRI.

I was previously a member of Robert Green‘s Genomes2People Research Program. Before that I was at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, where I directed a project on the concepts of ancestry and population. Another major research interest is predictive genomics, and in particular the clinical use of polygenic risk scores, including as part of the eMERGE study and GENOVA trial.

I am an active member of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH)’s Regulatory and Ethics Workstream. I co-chaired the taskforce that led to the first international policy for the return of results to research participants, I chaired the taskforce on diversity in datasets, and am currently co-chairing the newborn sequencing group.

I have published on various other ELSI topics, please see my publications page. I am also interested in the ethics of AI, particularly at the intersection of biology and health.

Previously, I worked as a computational biologist and product manager. I was with Fabric Genomics (formerly Omicia), a company bridging the gap between sequencing data and actionable clinical reports. And also at the erstwhile Driver Inc, “The cure for cancer treatment”, who sequenced tumor DNA as one part of an effort to match cancer patients to clinical trials. My doctoral degree is in Systems Biology from the University of Oxford.

Prior to the pandemic, I was blogging round-ups of genomics developments at All The Coolest Genomics.

Twitter: @acflewis