Faculty
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD
- Chief, Division of Ethics
- Professor of Medical Humanities and Ethics
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D., is Chief of the Division of Ethics and tenured Professor of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University. Trained as a medical anthropologist, Dr. Lee has extensive experience leading multi-disciplinary bioethics research on race, ancestry and equity in genomics, precision medicine and artificial intelligence; governance of biorepositories and commercialization of biotechnology; and diversity in academic medicine and entrepreneurship. Her projects include The Ethics of Inclusion: Diversity in Precision Medicine Research (R01 HG010330), Beyond Consent: Patient Preferences for Governance of Use of Clinical Samples and Data (R01 LM012180) and Social Networking and Personal Genomics: Implications for Health Research (R01 HG005086). Dr. Lee publishes broadly in the genomics, medical, bioethics, and social science literatures, and co-edited Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (2008), which resulted from a two year multi-disciplinary, cross-campus dialogue supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Stanford Humanities Institute. Dr. Lee is Co-PI of the newly launched national Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA) funded by the NIH/NHGRI, a collaboration between Columbia and Stanford with partners at the Hastings Center and Harvard University. Dr. Lee is also the Co-Director of the NIH/NHGRI funded biennial International ELSI Congress.
Dr. Lee is a Hastings Center Fellow and has been an Economic and Social Research Council Bright Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Wenner-Gren Foundation Faculty Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Medical Humanities and a Resident Fellow at the School for Advanced Research. Dr. Lee has served as Chairperson of the Institutional Review Board at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California, the NIH/NHGRI Coriell Consultation and Oversight Committee of the International Haplotype Map and the NIH/NHGRI Genomics and Society Working Group. Dr. Lee currently serves on the US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, the Scientific and Bioethics Advisory Boards of the Kaiser Permanente National Research Biobank, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Human Pangenome Consortium. In addition, Dr. Lee is President-elect of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors and serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics and Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. Dr. Lee received her doctorate from the UC Berkeley/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.
