Dr. Julia Brown is an anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow in bioethics, through the Kavli Center and the UCSF Bioethics Program and the UCSF Center for Maternal-Fetal Precision Medicine. She is also affiliated with the Centre for Global Mental Health at University of California, San Diego. She is author of The Clozapine Clinic: Health Agency in High-Risk conditions (Routledge 2022). She holds an NIH K99/R00 Award from the National Human Genome Research Institute to conduct an “embedded ethics'' ethnography on the emergence of prenatal gene therapies. As a Kavli Center Fellow, she...
Cristina Ceballos studies artificial intelligence ethics and regulation, with a focus on government agencies and how they address questions of privacy and algorithmic bias. She has published on disparate impact in the administrative state (in the Yale Law Journal) and about Customs and Border Protection and its use of face recognition technology. During law school, she worked at the American Civil Liberties Union in the Immigrants’ Rights Project. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Center, Cristina will push forward on two main lines of research: first, examining how government agencies...
Juliana Chase is currently a 5th year PhD student in Behavioral & Systems Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Juliana’s dissertation work employs experimental and computational techniques to better understand neural circuit differences in mouse models of autism. Throughout her PhD, Juliana has been interested in what happens when science leaves the lab and has been engaged with science policy and outreach organizations on campus. As a fellow, Juliana hopes to build on her experience as an organizer and science communicator to explore how scientists can partner with affected communities...
From the very start, the development of the human brain is coordinated by highly specialized gene expression patterns that continue to change not only in prenatal, childhood, or adolescent stages, but also well into adulthood. Leana King's thesis work in the Cognitive Neuroanatomy Lab (P.I. Kevin Weiner) aims to examine this dynamic relationship between gene expression and brain development. As a 4th year PhD student, King's interest in the field of genetics has also grown. From starting out in perceptual and computational neuroscience to now relating development and neuroanatomy to...
Adriano Mannino's research interests are in normative ethics, decision theory, political theory, and applied ethics, especially AI ethics and policy. His Ph.D. dissertation, "Playing Dice with Lives: An Essay on Aggregation, Rights, and Automation," examines the moral "numbers problem" through the lenses of moral philosophy, decision theory, and social choice. In other academic and practical work (as a social entrepreneur and policy consultant), Mannino has dealt with issues including climate change and collective action, animal ethics and politics, public health and medical resource...
Michal Masny is a philosopher with research interests in normative ethics, political philosophy, bioethics, and technology ethics. His doctoral work addressed the moral significance of the past, the nature of well-being, and the long-term future of humanity.
At the Kavli Center, Michal examines the impact of technology on human well-being. His current research focuses on: first, developments in geroscience that have the potential to significantly increase our lifespans and second, developments in artificial intelligence and robotics that could render humans obsolete in the...
José Muñoz is a philosopher and biologist interested in the ethical implications of neurotechnology. He was a research fellow in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and a research fellow in neuroethics at the University of Navarra and the International Center for Neuroscience and Ethics (CINET) in Spain. He was also an assistant professor of psychology at the European University of Valencia, in Spain, and a visiting researcher at the National Institute of Criminal Sciences (INACIPE) in Mexico. His project at the Kavli Center is intended to anticipate and...
As a cognitive neuroscientist, Narayan Sankaran's research examines the brain mechanisms underlying human communication, with a focus on understanding the neural computations that enable us to perceive complex sounds like music and speech. To achieve this, Sankaran measures human brain activity using a variety of invasive and noninvasive electrophysiological recording techniques.
As a Kavli Center fellow, Sankaran seeks to develop frameworks that would ensure the advancement of ethical neuroscientific aims. Sankaran is specifically interested in ethical concerns emerging from the...
Arik Shams is interested in the intersections of genome editing, bioethics, and science policy. As a Kavli Center Fellow, Shams plans on learning and working on a number of projects in these areas, with emphasis on CRISPR technology implementation in agriculture and energy, capacity-building to mitigate global food insecurity, and training new scientists in issues of science justice, bioethics, and social impact. Shams received a B.S. from the University of Southern Mississippi, and did two years of post-baccalaureate research at the National Institute of Health. Shams received a PhD in...