Leadership & Organization

Mildred Cho, Ph.D. is Co-Principal Investigator of CERA and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics Division of Medical Genetics and in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. Dr. Cho's major areas of interest are the ethical and social impacts of genetic research and data science and their applications, including to precision medicine, gene therapy, the human microbiome, and synthetic biology.

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D. is Co-Principal Investigator of CERA and Chief of the Division of Ethics and Professor of Medical Humanities & Ethics at Columbia University. As a medical anthropologist, she leads multidisciplinary studies of the sociocultural dimensions and ethical issues in genomics, precision medicine, artificial intelligence. Her work focuses on epistemic justice and equity in the biosciences, including ontologies of racial categorization, the role of institutions in research partnerships with communities, and team collaboration in translational research. Dr. Lee is past President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors and serves on the US Secretary Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections.

Deanne Dunbar Dolan, Ph.D. is a Research Scholar at Stanford Medicine. She completed master’s degrees in history of medicine and anthropology and a doctorate in anthropology at Emory University. At CERA, Deanne co-directs operations, co-leads the curation and synthesis and web development teams, manages CERA partnerships with academic journals, and the is the general editor of ELSIhub Collections.

Josephine Johnston, L.L.B, M.B.H.L is a Senior Research Scholar at the Hastings Center and Associate Professor in the Bioethics Center at University of Otago. Trained in law and bioethics, Ms. Johnston has led several projects on ELSI issues related to prenatal genetic testing, gene editing, and newborn sequencing. She is an expert on the ethical, legal, and policy implications of biomedical technologies, particularly as used in human reproduction, psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience.

Aaron Goldenberg is a Professor and Vice-Chair in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is also Director for the CWRU Bioethics Center for Community Health and Genomic Equity (CHANGE). Dr. Goldenberg's research program focuses on the intersection between ethics, genetics, rare diseases, newborn screening, and health equity. 

David Magnus, PhD is Thomas A. Raffin Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine and by Courtesy of Bioengineering at Stanford University and an Associate Dean for Research. Magnus is a member of the Ethics Committee for the Stanford Hospital. He is currently the Vice-Chair of the IRB for the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative ("All of Us"). He is the former President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors, and is the Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Bioethics.

Russ Altman, M.D., Ph.D. is The Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine and Biomedical Data Science, and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University. He is past Chair of Bioengineering, past Director of the Biomedical Informatics Training Program and is the founding PI of the PharmGKB. He is Co-PI of the FDA Supported UCSF-Stanford Center for Regulatory Science and Innovation (CERSI), and he is an Associate Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

Teri E. Klein, Ph.D. is Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Data Sciences and Medicine (Division of Biomedical Informatics Research) and Genetics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She is Co-Principal Investigator of PharmGKB, a pharmacogenomics knowledge resource that annotates pharmacogenetic variants, curates drug dosing guidelines and FDA drug labels, summarizes important pharmacogenomics literature, and enables consortia, Co-Principal Investigator of CPIC, a pharmacogenetics consortium for the creation, curation and dissemination of peer-reviewed, evidence-based pharmacogenetics clinical practice guidelines, Co-Principal Investigator of PharmCAT, a tool for software tool to extract guideline variants from a genetic dataset, interpret the variant alleles, and generate a report with genotype-based prescribing recommendations which can be used to inform treatment decisions, and, Co-Principal Investigator for the ClinGen, a central resource that defines the clinical relevance of genes and variants for use in precision medicine and research.

Paul Appelbaum, M.D. is the Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine & Law at Columbia, and was Director of the Columbia Center for Research on Ethical, Legal, & Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic, and Behavioral Genetics from 2010-23. Dr. Appelbaum's research focuses on the ethical and legal implications of neuropsychiatric genetics and how legal and ethical rules affect medical practice and research, including informed consent, decisional capacity, mandatory treatment, advance directives, and confidentiality.

Maya Sabatello, LL.B., Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Clinical Bioethics at Columbia University. She specializes in bioethics, disability studies, and international/comparative human rights. Her research focuses on law, society, medicine, and disability; assisted reproductive technologies; and the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics, especially in pediatrics and underserved populations.