BME 80G Seminar: Sara Ackerman – Doing Ethics From The Inside: Collaboration, Critique, and Contradiction in Team Science

Presenter: Sara Ackerman, Medical Anthropologist and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco

Description: Team science has been widely promoted as a collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach to addressing key scientific questions, yet power differences and epistemic hierarchies persist. This talk explores "embedded ethics"—a model in which social scientists and ethicists work directly with scientific research teams. Drawing on findings from an empirical ethics project embedded in a multi-year clinical genomics study, I demonstrate how qualitative methods and participatory design can shift the researcher-participant dynamic toward greater reciprocity and attention to enrolled families’ experiences. At the same time, ethicists and social scientists can find themselves in an uncomfortable and even paradoxical position, expected to facilitate project goals—such as recruitment of historically underrepresented groups—while simultaneously critically assessing the very categories of difference and measures being used. In the future, team science collaborations can result in more just and broadly beneficial science if social science, humanities and community partners are able to meaningfully contribute to the research agenda itself.

Bio: Sara Ackerman, PhD, MPH, is a medical anthropologist and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research draws on ethnographic methods and public engagement to examine how genomics, artificial intelligence and other emerging medical technologies affect the lives of patients and caregivers and shape conceptions of health, illness and the public good. Sara teaches courses on community-engaged research, qualitative methods, and research ethics at UCSF. As Director of the Bioethics and Regulatory Support Program for UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, she is working to increase patient and public participation in decisions about the use of AI in clinical care and the sharing of patients’ clinical data for research.

Hosted by: Professor Karen Miga, BME Department