Lisa Parker

Lisa Parker, a philosopher, is the Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote Professor of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, and Professor of Human Genetics in the Graduate School of Public Health. She directs the University’s interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Bioethics program in The Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and is director of the Area of Concentration in Humanities, Ethics, and Palliative Care in the School of Medicine. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program and a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science. She leads the University’s Science, Ethics, and Society Initiative, designed to foster campus-wide discussion of research ethics and the social implications of scientific research and technology.

Dr. Parker has published extensively on ethical concerns related to the design and conduct of research, particularly genetic research and mental health research, as well as on aesthetic surgery, confidentiality, and informed consent. With a national working group of the Association of Schools of Public Health, Dr. Parker edited Ethics and Public Health: Model Curriculum (Association of Schools of Public Health, 2003). She is co-author of the second edition of Informed Consent: Legal Theory and Clinical Practice (Oxford, 2001) and is co-editor of Mutating Concepts, Evolving Disciplines: Genetics, Medicine, and Society in the Philosophy and Medicine Series published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002.

Dr. Parker’s recent research has focused on the ethical management of incidental findings and return of research results, privacy protection, pharmacogenomic research and genetic enhancement. She has sustained interest in employing feminist approaches to bioethical issues and in the critical analysis of bioethics as a social practice and field of inquiry. She served as a co-investigator for international research ethics training programs focused in China, sponsored by the Fogarty International Center of the NIH, and provided research ethics training in Kolkata and New Delhi, India through two other Fogarty-sponsored training programs. From 2015-2017, she chaired the Genomics and Society Working Group of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research for the NHGRI, where she has served on the study section of the ELSI Program (the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Program) and on national working groups examining the management of incidental findings and research results. Since 2007, she has served on the Expert Scientific Panel of the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network.

Dr. Parker collaborates with investigators across the University, as well as nationally and internationally, on both empirical studies and theoretical and policy analyses. Topics of her research collaborations range from depression treatment to traumatic brain injury and mild cognitive impairment. She currently serves as an ethics consultant on studies involving biobanking and whole exome/genome sequencing in different patient populations, and is a faculty member in the University’s Institute for Precision Medicine.