Anna Lewis

I am a bioethicist focusing on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of Genetics and Genomics (ELSI). I am interested in the past, present and future impact of genomics on individuals and on society. I used to work in the genetics industry; I am convinced of the need for careful reflection and gathering of evidence to help ensure the upsides of genomics are realized, hence my career redirection towards ELSI work. You can read more on my publications page. I am currently a Research Scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I am working on a project entitled “Identifying strategies to reveal genetic results over the lifespan”, funded by a K99 award from the NHGRI, mentored by Dr Robert Green and co-mentored by Drs Ingrid Holm and Amy McGuire. I was previously at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, where I directed a project on the concepts of ancestry and population. Motivated by the increasing importance of these concepts across biomedicine, we completed empirical and normative work around how these concepts are and should be used. With collaborators at the Scientific Citizenship Initiative, we are currently adapting some of this content for learning courses aimed at practicing scientists. Another major research interest is predictive genomics, and in particular the clinical use of polygenic risk scores, including as part of the eMERGE study and GENOVA trial. I am an active member of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH)’s Regulatory and Ethics Workstream. I co-chaired the taskforce that led to the first international policy for the return of results to research participants, I chaired the taskforce on diversity in datasets, and am currently co-chairing the newborn sequencing group. I have published on various other ELSI topics, please see my publications page. I am also interested in the ethics of AI, particularly at the intersection of biology and health. Previously, I worked as a computational biologist and product manager. I was with Fabric Genomics (formerly Omicia), a company bridging the gap between sequencing data and actionable clinical reports. And also at the erstwhile Driver Inc, “The cure for cancer treatment”, who sequenced tumor DNA as one part of an effort to match cancer patients to clinical trials. My doctoral degree is in Systems Biology from the University of Oxford.