Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson is Pillar Leader in Ethics. She joined the MRC in 2006 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, continuing thereafter as Research Associate. Currently she co-leads the Ethics pillar, which encompasses the Ethical, Social, and Cultural (ESC) Program for the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).  Within the ESC Program, Dr. Emerson provides ethics consultation on the Advisory Service that supports the 44 Grand Challenges projects and the broader Global Health portfolio of the BMGF, and leads a program of research on the Use and Sharing of Data and Biological Specimens.  Previously, Dr. Emerson led the neuro-regenerative medicine study for the Regenerative Medicine Ethics Network (RMEthNet), a CIHR-funded multi-disciplinary network of Canadian and US investigators, which she still coordinates.  

Dr. Emerson has interdisciplinary training in biomedical science and the humanities. Her PhD (McMaster) is in Philosophy, specializing in theoretical and applied ethics.  Her current research is focused on i) ‘data and tissue’ issues in global health and public health research; ii) ethics of disease eradication; and iii) normative issues related to the clinical introduction of novel therapies.  While at McMaster she contributed to a CIHR study of how REBs manage privacy, confidentiality, and consent in the secondary use of health information, and to a study sponsored by the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance that developed the ethical-legal framework for a national retrospective tissue microarray resource for breast cancer research.  She is co-investigator on the Canadian Network for the Governance of Ethical Health Research Involving Humans and a member of the Ethics Working Group for the recently launched Ontario Health Study.  Dr. Emerson teaches in the Training Program in Regenerative Medicine, University of Toronto. She has previously taught in the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University.  She was a SSHRC scholar and an AMS Inc. Bioethics Fellow.