Faculty
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD
- Chief, Division of Ethics
- Professor of Medical Humanities and Ethics
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD is Chief of the Division of Ethics and Professor of Medical Humanities & Ethics with tenure at Columbia University. Trained as a medical anthropologist, Dr. Lee has extensive experience leading multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional bioethics research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including Just Inclusion and Equity: Negotiating Community-Research Partnerships in Genomics Research (1R01 HG12841-01), Ethics of Inclusion: Diversity in Precision Medicine Research (1R01HG010330), and Beyond Consent: Patient Preferences for Governance of Use of Clinical Samples and Data (1R01LM012180). Dr. Lee recently served on the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on the Use of Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry as Population Descriptors in Genomics Research that produced guidelines for NIH. Throughout her work, Dr. Lee has focused on the ethical and social dimensions of emerging biotechnologies and issues related to institutional governance, benefit sharing, equity, and scientific collaboration. Dr. Lee publishes broadly in the science, medical, bioethics, and social science literatures, and co-edited Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (2008), which resulted from a two-year multi-disciplinary dialogue she led funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Stanford Humanities Institute. With support from a grant from the National Library of Medicine, Dr. Lee’s current book project is entitled, “Diversity in Practice: the Quest for Inclusion in Precision Medicine”.
Dr. Lee is Co-PI of the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA)/ELSIhub funded by the NIH/NHGRI and was Co-Director of the 2020, 2022 and 2024 ELSI Congress. Dr. Lee is a member of the US Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP) and serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Kaiser Permanente National Research Biobank, NIH funded Human Pangenome Research Consortium, and the Genome Canada funded Canada First Research Excellence Fund Program DNA to RNA: An Inclusive Canadian Approach to Genomic-based RNA Therapeutics (D2R).
Dr. Lee has served as President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors (ABPD) and as co-chair of the ABPD Presidential Task Force on Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. She serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics and Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics and on the Editorial Advisory Committee for the American College of Medical Genetics Journals Genetics in Medicine and Genetics in Medicine Open. She is a Hastings Center Fellow and has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in the Humanities, a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellow, a University of Edinburgh Bright Ideas Fellow, and a Fellow at the School for Advanced Research.
Dr. Lee has mentored over 30 trainees and early career and tenure track faculty. At Columbia, Dr. Lee co-leads the NIH funded Justice Dialogues, serves as Chair of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions and is Director of the Team Science Program at the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Dr. Lee received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco (UCB/UCSF) joint program in Medical Anthropology and her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University.
Maya Sabatello, LLB, PhD
- Associate Professor of Medical Sciences (in Medicine and in Medical Humanities and Ethics)
Maya Sabatello, LLB, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medical Sciences (in Medicine) at the Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics, Department of Medicine; Associate Professor (in Medical Humanities and Ethics), at the Division of Ethics, Department of Ethics and the Humanities; and Co-Director of the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture Project at Columbia University. She is a former litigator with trans-disciplinary background and has extensive experience in national and international policy-making relating to human and disability rights. Sabatello studies how biomedical technologies and genomic information impact social structures, marginalized communities, and individual rights and health outcomes. Her scholarship focuses on law, society, medicine, and disability; regulations of reproductive technologies; and the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics and precision medicine. Her projects include Disability, Diversity and Trust in Precision Medicine Research (R01 HG010868), Evidence-based Policy Recommendations to Address Bioethical Challenges in the Return of Genetic Results in Nephrology (U01 DK100876-07 Supp); the psychosocial impact of genomic data on adolescents and family relations (studies funded by the Children Cardiomyopathy Foundation and Columbia University’s Precision Medicine and Society); and Disability Inclusion in Precision Medicine Research (P50 HG007257-05S1). She recently completed a K01 Award that explored the uses of psychiatric genetics evidence in civil litigation and non-clinical settings, such as child custody disputes and schools (K01 HG008653).
Dr. Sabatello has been a Gray Matters Fellow, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Law. She serves as a member at various genomic- and ethics-related committees at Columbia University and elsewhere, including the Tri-Institutional Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee (Tri-SCI ESCRO), the NHGRI’s Community Engagement in Genomics Working Group (CEGWG) and the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the All of Us Research Program. She currently Co-Chairs the Ethics Committee of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics.
Alexis Walker, PhD
- Assistant Professor
Alexis Walker, PhD is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in Science and Technology Studies (STS), political anthropology, organizational studies, and bioethics. Her research investigates the social dynamics of financial and private sector organizations in health and medicine. She is currently Principal Investigator on a four-year project (2019-2023) examining perspectives from members of the commercial genomics industry on the social and ethical dynamics of their field. This work is funded by an Early Career Investigator award (K99/R00) from the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Dr. Walker’s previous research has examined the organizational dynamics of international financial institutions making loans for global health projects, the ethics of “precision rationing,” and the politics of patenting biotechnology. Her work employs qualitative methods, including ethnography, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. Her most recent work includes additional survey methods and town hall-style focus groups.
Prior to coming to Columbia, Dr. Walker was a postdoctoral fellow at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Walker received her doctorate from Cornell University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies, a master’s degree in political sociology and STS from University of Strasbourg (France), and an undergraduate degree in Biology from Brown University.
Lucas J. Matthews, PhD
- Assistant Professor
Lucas J. Matthews, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities & Ethics in the Division of Ethics at the Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons at Columbia University and a Presidential Scholar at The Hastings Center. His research is informed by an inter-disciplinary background in philosophy of science postdoctoral, human behavior genetics, and bioethics. Dr. Matthews engages a mixed-method and multi-discipline approach to scientific, conceptual, and philosophical questions regarding recent developments in genetics. Dr. Matthews’ most recent research projects examine the social, psychological, ethical, and policy implications of genomic prediction of educational outcomes. His NHGRI-funded K award on “The Geneticization of Education” involves empirical studies of how individuals are impacted by polygenic scores for educational attainment.
