2 New Postdoctoral Fellows to Join the Department

The Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy is thrilled to announce two new NHGRI-funded postdoctoral fellows in the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics, who will join the department in summer/fall 2020 as our fourth class of entering fellows. They were selected from an outstanding pool of 42 applicants, our largest ever. Read their bios below:

Katharine (KP) Callahan received her MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2016 and completed her pediatrics residency at Columbia University in 2019. She is currently a neonatology fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her research has focused on how genetics affects clinical care from the perspective of both doctors and patients. Her most recent work explored ways to enhance physician’s understanding of disability and how learning about a patient's life beyond a genetic diagnosis can enhance medical care. For the next three years, Katharine will combine Neonatology and ELSI fellowships and plans to investigate the ethical and social dynamics of genetic testing in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Naomi Scheinerman is currently an AI Initiative Joint Fellow-in-Residence at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where she is engaged in a project to identify, moralize, and prescribe solutions to the problem of exploitation across numerous fields and industries. This follows on her research for her PhD in Political Theory from Yale University's Department of Political Science, where she endorsed using randomly selected bodies of lay individuals as promising institutional avenues for democratic participation in regulating new and emerging biotechnologies, particularly gene editing tools, as well as artificial intelligence applications and algorithmic designs. Prior to this, Naomi worked as a research assistant at The Hastings Center and received her BA in philosophy and political science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.