Full Name
Anna Lewis
Job title
Research Associate
University/company
Harvard University
Speaker bio
Anna Lewis completed her PhD in Systems Biology from the University of Oxford in 2012 and has since been working in the genetics industry in the San Francisco Bay Area as a computational biologist and product manager. Day to day confrontation with ethical issues led her to want to pursue these questions full time. Her interests cover how ethics should be incorporated into scientific and technological development, but also how and whether new technologies will impact our ethical thinking. She has published empirical work on how the prospect of genetic modification can impact our sense of fairness. While at the EJ Safra Center she will be leading the Genetics, Ethics and Society project in the JHD Impact Initiative focused on ethical issues arising from the recent predictive turn in genomics, whereby polygenic scores are designed that reflect our predispositions for disease, for academic achievement, for violence. These developments come in the context of predictions being made about us in all aspects of our lives.