Events

Join us in-person (lunch will be provided) at NEW LOCATION in the Lower Level Conference Room of Deering Hall, or virtually at:
https://jh.zoom.us/j/99768368941
Password: Seminar

The talk will describe ‘Design Bioethics’, a novel approach that develops purpose-built, engineered tools for empirical research in bioethics. Examples focus on a series of projects that we co-developed with adolescents, to investigate the ethics of early intervention using predictive testing and digital phenotyping in the context of mental health.

Ilina Singh is a Professor of Neuroscience & Society in the Department of Psychiatry and Co-Director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the social and ethical dimensions of research and innovation in biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry, with a focus on young people and families. As the inaugural recipient of a Wellcome Trust University Award in Biomedical Ethics (2008), Professor Singh pioneered the development of innovative methods to investigate young people’s experiences of authenticity, moral agency and personal responsibility in the context of psychiatric disorder. This early work motivated a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award (2016-2022) on the ethics of early intervention in child psychiatry (www.begoodeie.com).

Since 2016, Prof Singh has also led global collaborative projects on the science and ethics of neuropsychiatric genomics and digital mental health across 8 sites in Africa and in Brazil, with funding from the Stanley Centre at the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT, British Academy, Global Challenges Research Fund, and NIH (www.neurogene.org). She currently leads the Flourishing and Wellbeing research platform as part of the £36m NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, where she has also served as the lead for patient and public involvement, participation and engagement for the past 6 years.

From 2020-22, Prof Singh was PI for the United Kingdom Pandemic Ethics Accelerator (www.pandemicethics.org) and advises the UK Government Covid-19 Pandemic Public Inquiry. She also helped to oversee the UK’s £150m covid-19 research portfolio as a member of the UKRI covid-19 research and innovation taskforce. She has published widely, including in Nature, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Lancet, Social Science and Medicine, the American Journal of Bioethics; and she was an author-commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development (2018). Professor Singh’s work with young people to empower them in mental health research has won national and international awards. Her current research interests are focused on designing engineered tools to conduct research on collective processes of reasoning, priority setting and decision-making among young people around questions of nature, mental health and climate justice.