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Past Trainees

Stanley Hassinger is a medical student at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his B.S. in biochemistry from NC State University and then completed a master’s degree in philosophy at Virginia Tech. His primary interests are in the therapy/enhancement debate. As a CGS trainee, he worked on a project with Arlene Davis and Rebecca Walker investigating what effect prenatal genetic interventions have on the relationship between parents and children. Return to Top

Hedwig Lee graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in 2009 with a PHD in Sociology. She was also a NICHD-funded Predoctoral Trainee at the Carolina Population Center. Her dissertation research examined the relationships between social disadvantage and obesity and physical activity trajectories in adolescence and the transition to adulthood, with a particular focus on racial and ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities. She worked with her advisor, Kathleen Mullan Harris, and other faculty at UNC, on a variety of interdisciplinary research projects exploring the relationships between social context and health, educational and family formation outcomes in adolescence and the transition to young adulthood using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). She also worked on a large scale project involving DNA collection of undergraduates in a large Southern University and published a paper that discussed the data collection process. She is going to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to begin a two year fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar where she will continue to study health disparities. After this fellowship, Hedy will begin a tenure-track assistant professor position in sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle.   Return to Top

Ashley Naimi is a PhD student in Epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill. He received a Bachelor of Science in Physiology with a minor in Multidisciplinary Studies in Science, and an MSc in Epidemiology that focused on the relationship between neighborhood level social factors and cardiovascular disease. His current interests include understanding: how genes can influence population-level cardiovascular disease rates when considering the social, political and economic contexts of those populations under study; the strengths and limitations of current methods available to address these issues; and how the history, philosophy and social aspects of science relate to the nature of studies on genes and environments. Return to Top 

Ashton Powell received his Ph.D. in the Department of Neurobiology at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2007. His main ELSI interest is in policy and ethics debates surrounding scientific advancement. As a student, he was awarded a fellowship at the Duke Genome Ethics, Law and Policy (GELP) Center. Under Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, he researched topics regarding intellectual property law and how it impacts the advancement of clinical research and health care. He provided a case study to the Secretary’s Advisory Committee for Genetics, Health, and Society (SACGHS) on the effects of gene patents on patient access to genetic testing. Ashton has received a fellowship for Spring 2009 with the Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship Program of the National Academies, a program designed to engage science, engineering, medical, veterinary, business, public policy, and law students in the analytical process that informs the creation of national policy-making with a science/technology element. As a fellow assigned to the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law (CSTL), Ashton will be involved in a number of activities designed to develop skills essential to working in the world of science policy. Return to Top

Rebecca Schaffer is a graduate student in the Anthropology Department at UNC-CH. She has worked as a research assistant at the FPG Child Development Institute (UNC), the department of Social Medicine (UNC), and the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy (Duke). Her most recent research projects include a study of family interpretations of genetic knowledge, an evaluation of an arts-based multicultural education project, a study of children's understandings of human differences, and a study of the peer relationships of court-involved teenagers. She joined the Carolina FXS team in 2005 to assist with data analyses and literature reviews.

Meghan Shanahan is a graduate student in the Maternal and Child Health department in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She joined the Carolina Fragile X Project in 2002 and from 2004 to 2007 she worked with Arlene Davis, Debra Skinner, and Don Bailey on ELSI issues related to expanded newborn screening. Meghan’s interests include children with special health care needs and child maltreatment. She is currently working on the evaluation of an Shaken Baby Syndrome prevention program. Return to Top

Ian Whitmarsh, Ph.D. was an ELSI-funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences at UNC during 2005-2007. He received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton University in 2005.  As a post-doctoral fellow, he worked with Debra Skinner and Don Bailey to explore the significance of ambiguity in genetic discourses through research with families of children diagnosed with either  Fragile X, Klinefelter or Turner syndromes and the significance of receiving an unexpected diagnosis as the result of a genetic test. Currently, Ian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, where he is continuing his dissertation research on tensions in the uses of biomedical categories linking race and disease among researchers, medical practitioners, government officials, and patients.  As a graduate student, he carried out ethnographic research following a US-based asthma genetics study conducted in Barbados, exploring how the study was creating new regimes of care, state interventions, and unexpected biomedical diagnostics.  He is now doing research in the Caribbean and the US on the emerging biomedical category of the metabolic syndrome, a diagnostic that links diabetes, obesity, abnormal cholesterol, and hypertension as risk factors for heart disease.  The syndrome is considered more prevalent among Hispanic and African American women, making gender and ethnicity critical to the new scientific object.  This work continues his research into the ways in which vernaculars of ethnicity, gender, and illness shape and are reshaped by the expansion of bioscience into new health conditions.  Return to Top

Louise Winstanly received her law degree (LLB (Hons) Business Law) from the London Guildhall University in the United Kingdom. She is admitted to the New York Bar. She recently completed her Masters degree in Bioethics at Union College/Mt. Sinai Hospital, NY. As a CGS trainee, she worked on clinical and research ethics projects with Arlene Davis and served as an intern on the UNC Hospital Ethics Committee. Her area of research interest is in law and policy issues pertaining to stem cell research, informed consent – pediatric research and reproductive technology. She is further interested in the protection of patient privacy related to genetic research. Return to Top

The Center for Genomics and Society is supported by the ELSI Research Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Grant Number P50HG004488.