My research not only raises critical social and ethical issues pertaining to emerging genomic technologies, it engages and makes findings accessible to stakeholders inside and outside the scientific enterprise. In my work, I solicit community and public perspectives on the role and relevance of genomics in clinical care and society. For example, I led a public engagement project on social and behavioral genomics and co-designed a clinical program with Stanford Health Care patients and caregivers.

Generating productive dialogue on the risks, benefits, and ethical responsibilities of genetics/genomics is vital for securing ethical and socially responsible uses of genomic data and analyses. Adversarial Collaboration was coined by the Noble Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman who was tired of bitter and unproductive debates between academic researchers. I utilize the adversarial collaborative framework to enter into dialogue with colleagues to better understand how and why we disagree. You can read more about why I think ethical and anticipatory genomics research calls for us to celebrate our disagreements here. The book I am currently working on with my colleague and friend Sam Trejo is an adversarial collaboration.

Genetics research on human behavior raises important social and ethical issues. This research challenges our intuitions about free-will and human agency. It has also been used to validate racist, classist, and ableist narratives about the origins of social inequality. The growing influx of genomic data, coupled with the rise of industry applications using genomic data, inspire my work examining the social and ethical implications of molecular genomic data for society broadly and K-12 education specifically. I began research in this area during my PhD in Education at the University of Cambridge. To learn more, read this report I wrote with my colleague Lucas J. Matthews on genomics, behavior, and social outcomes. Or, check out our public repository of Frequently Asked Questions documents associated with genomic studies on human behavior and social outcomes that I helped to build. It was featured in Nature Genetics.

Science cannot fight disease, create technology, or solve the world’s biggest problems in an equitable or just manner if it is stripped of the social context. It is therefore necessary to understand and acknowledge the historical and contemporary factors that influence how genomics research is conducted, translated, and interpreted. My work explores questions like: How might advancements in genomics research on educationally relevant behaviors and outcomes might inform narratives about racial disparities in education? Or how can including multiracial individuals in race, ethnicity, and ancestry frameworks move us beyond society’s overreliance on discrete systems of categorization that reduce complexity? To learn more about my work in this area, take a look at an annotated reading list I helped put together on Race, Genetics, and Genetics Education and check out this paper co-written with my multiracial colleagues.