Professor Jantina De Vries

Research Interests

I am an ethicist working on a host of ethical challenges that arise in the context of new and emerging health technologies. My primary expertise is in the ethics of African genomics research and investigating a range of ethical challenges relating to consent, benefit sharing, issues around sample and data sharing, and stigma in genomics. Increasingly, my attention is drawn to issues around fairness, equity and justice in the conduct of international collaborative health research. This includes work around the importance of diversity and representation in knowledge creation - both in terms of who participates, and in terms of who conducts the research. In the coming years, and from my vantage point in the Neurosciences Institute, I will lead a Wellcome Trust Research Development Programme (RDP) that seeks to explore how knowledge from the African humanities could or should inform on the ethics of new and emerging health technologies. That Programme intersects with some of the scientific questions that researchers at the NI are interrogating, including fundamental questions about what it means to be human and how evidence from neuroscience should or could impact on how we make moral or ethical decisions. The RDP will bring to the NI some of Africa's premier humanities scholars over the next five years.

Research Areas

Neuroethics