PROJECT NARRATIVE The purpose of this R25 Diversity Action Plan grant proposal is to create a program that will equip students with disabilities with mentoring, research, and curricular resources that facilitate their advancement towards becoming members of the ELSI community of scholars.

PROJECT NARRATIVE The ability to recruit and protect research participants across multiple sites and multiple states is critical to the success of large-scale precision medicine and other biomedical research supported by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies to improve human health. Accomplishing this task requires a clear understanding of which state?s laws apply and under what circumstances, but the empirical and normative foundations for addressing choice of law questions in a research context are lacking.

The overall purpose of this grant is to explore the nature, extent and consequences of data-sharing and data- withholding in academic genetics and the other life sciences.

With the growing importance of biobank research, concerns have been raised about how to protect the interests of donors. The current ethics framework mainly focuses on protecting against risks to donors' welfare and to their privacy. However, there has been little systematic empirical, normative, or policy focus on the non-welfare interests of donors, i.e., concerns about the moral, societal, or religious implications of research using their donation that may affect their willingness to donate.

Individual institutions across the country have worked to support research in a wide variety of areas, including precision medicine research, by developing large biorepositories comprised of biospecimens and health data collected from local patients and controls. However, these local cohorts rarely provide the diversity and size needed to identify and study subsets of patients who share biological mechanisms for their disease, and are thus more likely to respond to the same targeted therapies.

Ms. Christi Guerrini is research faculty in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). BCM is a premier academic health science center known for excellence in education, research, and patient care. The BCM main campus is located in the Texas Medical Center, which is the largest medical center in the world. The Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at BCM was established in 1982 and has created an academic culture defined by and supportive of collaborative research and teaching.

Through the combined study of individual variation in genes, environment, and lifestyle, precision medicine research offers the potential for discoveries that will improve human health. Spurred by the declining cost of next-generation sequencing, widespread use of electronic health records, proliferation of wearable devices, and other technological advances, the immense scale required for such research is now within reach. These same characteristics, however, escalate the challenge of protecting research participants.