Dr Anna Lewis, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University
This webinar (14th July 2022) features Dr. Anna Lewis, where she presents her work on the challenges and pitfalls in how we conceptualise, describe and use ancestry in genomics, as outlined in her paper published in Science earlier this year, Getting genetic ancestry right for science and society, where she advocates for a "multidimensional, continuous view of ancestry and a move away from continental ancestry categories".
Dr. Anna Lewis is a scholar of Ethical, Legal and Social implications (ELSI) of Genomics. She is currently a Research Associate at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, where she is directing a project on the concepts of ancestry and population. Motivated by the increasing importance of these concepts across biomedicine, they are doing empirical and normative work around how these concepts are and should be used.
Previously, Anna worked as a computational biologist and product manager. She was with Fabric Genomics (formerly Omicia), a company bridging the gap between sequencing data and actionable clinical reports, as well as at the erstwhile Driver Inc, who sequenced tumour DNA as one part of an effort to match cancer patients to clinical trials.