Current Fellows

Nicole Foti, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the CTSA Postdoctoral Scholar at The Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics. medical sociologist whose research explores the political economy of biomedicine and health equity. She earned her PhD in Sociology from UC San Francisco in 2023 and was a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Berman Institute of Bioethics before joining Stanford. Her research has been funded by the Center for Engaged Scholarship and published in Social Science & Medicine, the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB) Empirical Bioethics, and Social Studies of Science (forthcoming), among others.

Chenery Lowe, Ph.D., CGC, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford Training Program in ELSI Research (T32) at The Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics. She is a genetic counselor and healthcare communication researcher. She received her ScM in Genetic Counseling from the Johns Hopkins University/ National Institutes of Health Genetic Counseling Training Program in 2018. Chenery received her Ph.D. in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2022, where she later served as an assistant scientist and academic director for the JHU/NIH genetic counseling program. Clinically, she has provided genetic counseling in immunology and adult oncology settings. She has taught graduate-level courses on interpersonal communication in health care, health literacy, and social and behavioral research in genetic counseling. Her research interests are in the areas of patient-provider communication, health equity, implicit bias, communication skills training interventions, and the ethics of interpersonal influence in medical care.

Madelena Ng, DrPH is the is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford Training Program in ELSI Research (T32) at The Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics. Madelena Ng is an applied health scientist who evaluates the real-world impact of emerging technologies on clinical, behavioral, and societal outcomes. Prior to her appointment at GCBE, Dr. Ng was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research leading foundational work in AI ethics, governance, and responsible innovation. She aims to further her training in ELSI research at the intersection of generative biological AI, human rights, and industry practice. She is committed to driving ethics from the margins to the core of health AI development and decision-making.

Jonathon VandenHombergh, PhD, MA, is the Clinical Ethics Fellow at The Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics. Jonathon completed his Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland and a visiting scholar in Neuroethics and Clinical Consciousness at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Jonathon's scholarship explores the nature of the human subject and its place in an increasingly complex world. His theoretical work focuses on consciousness, perception, and the philosophy of mind, while his applied research examines assisted dying, neurotechnology, and other important issues in bioethics. His most recent work centers on the ethical implications of artificial intelligence in therapy, companionship, surrogate decision-making, and other psychosocial applications.

Jonathon is especially interested in clinical ethics consultation, a field in which he began training at the NIH and will continue to develop at Stanford. He looks forward to applying his philosophical expertise to complex ethical questions in clinical and research settings, contributing to bioethics education, and collaborating with the interdisciplinary team at the Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics over the next two years.

Quinn Waeiss, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford Training Program in ELSI Research (T32) at The Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics. They received their Ph.D. in Political Science and comparative politics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They also hold a BA in Political Science and German from Grand Valley State University.

Former Postdocs

Jenny Clark Schiff, PhD, MA, MA was the Clinical Ethics Fellow at The Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics. She has research interests in reproductive ethics, disability ethics, and bioethical issues in sport. Dr. Schiff completed her PhD in Philosophy at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York in 2024. Her dissertation focused on poorly understood medical conditions that are, in large part, “invisible” but can be profoundly disabling to patients (e.g. myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, long COVID, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome). She is interested in how to improve the doctor-patient relationship in settings of uncertainty, and how to better design healthcare systems and medical education to care for patients with poorly understood medical conditions in a more just and humane manner. While pursuing her PhD, she was an Ethics Fellow, and then a Senior Ethics Fellow, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she facilitated ethics didactic sessions for medical students and various residency programs. She has also taught or assistant taught bioethics and philosophy courses to graduate students at New York University and undergraduate students at The City College of New York. Dr. Schiff is s 2014 recipient of a Fulbright research grant to study Philosophy and Education in Italy. She has an MA in Italian Literature and an MA in English Education, both from Columbia University. Dr. Schiff was a four-year member of the Varsity Women’s Lacrosse team as an undergraduate at Columbia and served as Co-Captain her senior year. She is a cellist in the Stanford Medicine Orchestra and enjoys following international women’s soccer.

Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, PhD was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Biomedical Ethics working on the identification of ethical, social, and legal considerations arising in the context of AI and the drug discovery process in partnership with GSK.ai. Prior to his appointment at Stanford, Dr. Djiberou completed a Mitacs Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowship at Simon Fraser University where he worked on the identification of lifestyle factors contributing to successful cognitive aging in older adults’ population using Machine Learning techniques. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Computer Science and an M.Eng. in Applied Mathematics from Université Clermont Auvergne, and a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the development of new unsupervised machine learning models and their applications to health data mining. In 2019, Dr. Djiberou was named the best Nigerien student in France based on academic performance by the Réseau des Etudiants Nigériens de France.

Rachel Ungar, PhD, was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford Training Program in ELSI Research (T32) at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Her graduate research was in computational genomics focused on multiomics approaches in Stephen Montgomery’s lab. She was an active member of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, and GREGoR rare disease consortia focused on transcriptomic methods and data standards. She also examined the impact of rare variants and sex on the X-chromosome. During her PhD, she co-created and taught a course expanding ethics education to bioscientists (GENE 220: Genetics, Ethics, and Society) and evaluated its impact. During her postdoc, Rachel aimed to use her background to integrate genomics and ethics, beginning with ethical considerations for rare and undiagnosed disorders. Rachel received her PhD in Genetics at Stanford. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of Arkansas with minors in mathematics and computer science.

Artem Trotsyuk, PhD, is a Gsk.ai - Stanford Ethics Fellow and received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Stanford University in 2022 and a Master’s in Computer Science, AI Specialization Track, in 2021. His BS is in Biological Sciences, with an emphasis in Neurology, Physiology, and Behavior, from UC Davis. In 2020, he was a McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society Fellow, and in 2019 an Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Fellow. In 2019 he was named a Forbes 30 under 30 Scholar. He has experience in venture capital and consulting in biotechnology and health policy. Some of his recent work includes outlining risks associated with data misuse and developing frameworks for the ethical use of patient data.

Brandy M. Fox, PhD

PhD, Health Care Ethics with a concentration in Empirical Research, The Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University
MS, Health Care Ethics, Creighton University
BA, Politics, The Catholic University of America
"My time as a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics was invaluable. As an ELSI researcher, I was able to expand and deepen my specific interests in veteran mental health and learn to work with scientists, researchers, and clinicians. My mentor, Professor Mildred Cho, was so supportive of my scholarly interests. She is a phenomenal mentor who helped me develop not only my ELSI project, but also greatly enhanced my research ethics experience. This fellowship gave me the skills to land my dream job as an assistant professor at an academic medical center. I highly recommend this program to scholars who are interested in interdisciplinary work with real-world impacts." - Brandy M. Fox

Carole Federico, PhD, MSc

PhD, Experimental Medicine, McGill University
MS, Bioethics, McGill University
BS, Psychology, University of British Columbia
"The GSK.ai-Stanford Ethics Fellowship was an amazing opportunity to work at the intersection of research ethics and artificial intelligence. The mentorship I received from the Stanford faculty – Mildred Cho, David Magnus, and Russ Altman – as well as the team at GSK.ai, was exceptional, and the academic environment was supportive and stimulating. Importantly, I felt encouraged to pursue my own interests and scholarship, and any opportunity to connect me to the “right people” was readily offered; as a result, my academic network has grown exponentially, and I feel better-prepared for a career as an independent scholar. I highly recommend the fellowship, as it was a truly formative experience." -Carole Federico

Kevin Mintz , PhD, MSc

PhD, Political Science specializing in Political Theory and American Politics, Stanford University
MSc, Political Theory, The London School of Economics & Political Science
BA, Government, Harvard College
"The Stanford Training Program in ELSI Research was one of the most transformative experiences of my early career. As a political theorist, I received structured mentorship in how to conduct qualitative bioethics research and apply for extramural funding from the NIH. Professors Cho and Tabor are brilliant mentors who are my strongest supporters and toughest critics. Thanks to their efforts, I am one of the few individuals with significant physical disabilities to have a faculty-level position in a medical school, right here at Stanford. In my time as a T32 Fellow, I learned about the intersection of rare disease research ethics and disability bioethics, as well as participated in both research ethics consultation and clinical ethics consultation (SCBE is one of the few institutions that has training opportunities in both kinds of consultation). At SCBE, a Fellow can really craft their own adventure in ELSI research and realize a career without limits." - Kevin Mintz

Ryan Felder, PhD

PhD, Philosophy, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- Research Interests Include: epistemic injustice in clinical ethics and communication, the ethics of artificial intelligence in health care, and the implications of contemporary pragmatism for normative ethics and metaethics.
MA, Philosophy, Binghamton University
BS, Philosophy, Rutgers University
"I would give my highest recommendation to the Stanford Fellowship in Clinical Ethics. The two-year program provides rigorous hands-on training in consultation skills with an experienced core team and has a track record of producing graduates that are ready to work independently as clinical ethicists. The fellowship also creates opportunities for one to pursue one’s research interests within a lively bioethics center. I have benefitted enormously from my time at Stanford." -Ryan Felder

Adam Omelianchuk, PhD

PhD, Philosophy, University of South Carolina
- Dissertation: What Makes Killing for Organs Wrong? A Defense of the 'Dead Donor' Rule.
- Committee: Christopher Tollefsen (supervisor), Jennifer A. Frey, George Khushf, Jeffrey P. Bishop
MA, Philosophy, Biola University
BS, Ministries, University of Northwestern - St. Paul
"The Clinical Ethics fellowship at SCBE was precisely the bridge I needed to move from the academic setting to the clinical setting without compromising rigorous academic research standards. The exposure to leading scholars, the high volume of complex cases, and the opportunities to develop a meaningful research project in collaboration with others far exceeded my expectations. It's hard to express how formative fellowship was for me as it challenged and transformed into a capable professional and desirable job candidate. The mentorship I received from David, Holly, and Alyssa was simply invaluable. I cannot recommend the fellowship enough." - Adam Omelianchuk

Vasiliki N. Rahimzadeh, PhD

PhD, Family Medicine and Primary Research, Specialization in Biomedical Ethics, McGill University
MSc Experimental Medicine, Specialization in Biomedical Ethics, McGill University
BS Microbial Biology, UC Berkeley

Vasiliki (Vaso) Rahimzadeh, PhD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. She investigates the ethical, legal, and social issues of health data sharing across emerging computing environments. The goals of her NIH-funded research are to inform data governance policy and practice which maximizes the scientific value of health data and respects the rights and interest of individuals and communities. Dr. Rahimzadeh co-directs the Center for Humanities-Based Health AI (a collaboration between Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University) and co-leads the Regulatory and Ethics Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. She has served the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine committee on life science governance and was appointed to the Bioethics Advisory Panel for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Dr. Rahimzadeh received her undergraduate degree in microbial biology from the University of California Berkeley. She earned both her MSc and PhD degrees in biomedical ethics from McGill University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with support from a National Human Genome Research Institute Ethical Legal and Social Implications Program training grant.

Sarah Wieten, PhD is a Clinical Ethics Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She received her PhD in philosophy from Durham University in 2018 and was a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Indiana University of Pennsylvania from 2017-2018. Her research lies at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, including work on clinical trial methodology, end-of-life decision-making, and direct-to-consumer genetic testing.

Heather Dron, PhD, MPH is a historian of medicine and public health who studies pregnancy, prenatal care, and research on infant disability. She completed her PhD in history of health science at UCSF in 2016. At the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, she is a fellow supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Ethical Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program. Her research interests include the history and ethics of research and prenatal care intended to prevent infant disability, ethical conduct of clinical trials, and perceptions of risk or uncertainty associated with environmental science and genomic technologies.

Nicole Martinez-Martin, PhD, JD

PhD, Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
JD, Harvard Law School
"Being a fellow in the T32 ELSI program gave me an exceptional foundation for embarking on a career as a bioethics researcher. Mildred Cho and David Magnus are brilliant bioethicists and truly the best mentors that a person could hope for. The program provides top-level training in bioethics scholarship, as well as a number of opportunities for learning how to provide ethics consultation for real-world projects. Dr. Cho excels in in grantsmanship and preparing mentees for conducting impactful ELSI research. Beyond that, though, Drs. Cho and Magnus support their mentees in crafting research projects that are personally meaningful and that contribute to the larger field of bioethics." - Nicole Martinez-Martin

Daphne O. Martschenko, PhD

BA, Slavic Languages and Literature, Stanford University
BA, Anthropology, Stanford University
M.Phil., University of Cambridge, Politics, Development, and Democratic Education
PhD, Education, University of Cambridge
"The NHGRI-funded T32 fellowship at Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics provided a critical foundation for my career in bioethics. Mentorship from Professors Mildred Cho and David Magnus, empowered me to develop a robust interdisciplinary approach to the ethical, legal, and social implications of human genetics/genomics and launch my career as a federally funded investigator. Thanks to SCBE, I’ve found my scholarly home and intellectual community." - Daphne Martschenko

Jason Batten, MD, MA (bioethics) completed his MD at the Stanford School of Medicine. He is currently an affiliate with the Center for Biomedical Ethics while he completes dual training in internal medicine and anesthesia residency programs. Prior to medical school, he worked as a teacher in low-income public schools and worked with the clinical ethics service of a Los Angeles community hospital; these experiences fostered a long-standing interest in improving communication and decision-making practices, especially with vulnerable populations. He is fortunate to have received mentorship and training in ethical, legal, and social implications research as a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Biomedical Ethics. He has applied this training to research published in the medical and bioethics literature, as well as to ongoing research and quality improvement projects.

Tara Diener, PhD received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in 2016 and a Graduate Certificate in Science, Technology, and Society in 2014. Prior to graduate studies at Michigan, she practiced as a Registered Nurse in obstetrics and pediatrics while earning an M.A. in Bioethics, Humanities, and Society from the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences (CEHLS) at Michigan State University. She has taught courses in creative non-fiction writing, medical, biological, and sociocultural anthropology, international and African studies, global health, political science, and the history of medicine in the US, Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. She is an anthropologist and historian of medicine, maternal and infant health and mortality, global health (non)systems, and nursing ethics and practice. Her research combines archival and ethnographic methods, and her previous projects have focused on the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone.

Risa Cromer, PhD is a medical anthropologist and feminist science & technology scholar. She completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in June 2016 and currently serves as a fellow within Stanford’s Thinking Matters program. Her research focuses on reproductive and racial politics within bioethical controversies in the United States. While at Stanford, she plans to work on a book based on her doctoral research that examines the afterlives of frozen human embryos left over from IVF and banked for future use, from embryo adoption to stem cell research. She brings experience as qualitative specialist on clinical research teams at the Portland Veteran Affairs Health System (2013-2016), with whom she remains a collaborator on projects addressing the health care needs of veterans.

Kate Weatherford Darling, PhD is a sociologist working across the boundaries of medical sociology, feminist science and technology studies, health policy and bioethics. Her research program uses qualitative sociological methods to understand how social, technological and biomedical transformations impact people living with chronic illnesses and disabilities in the U.S. She earned her doctorate in Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco in 2016 and served as the Assistant Director of Research and Academic Programs for the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz between 2016 - 2017. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science & Medicine, Science Technology & Human Values, and Engaging Science & Technology Studies. Her dissertation research traced the transformation of HIV into a manageable yet expensive chronic illness. At the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, her postdoctoral fellowship is supported by a National Human Genome Research Institute’s Ethical Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program training grant. Her postdoctoral research examines U.S. health inequalities in the era of Precision Medicine and investigates the social meanings of healthcare pricing data.

Karola Kreitmair, PhD was a Clinical Ethics Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She received her PhD in philosophy from Stanford University in 2013 and was a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford’s Thinking Matters program from 2013-2016. Her research interests include neuroethics, especially new technologies and deep brain stimulation, as well as ethical issues associated with wearable technology and citizen science.

Aaron Neiman is a PhD student in medical anthropology. His areas of interest include anthropology of the state, psychiatry, genomics, computing, and social and feminist studies of science. Aaron's undergraduate research focused on the sexual and racial politics of admixture genomics, and sought to understand the relationship between macro-level geopolitical and economic forces and the minutiae that comprise scientific studies. He further investigated these questions in relation to the human genome in his fellowship with the Center for Integration of Research on Genetics and Ethics. In particular, Aaron is interested in understanding how pre-theoretical assumptions about race, gender, and mental health are built into scientific studies of genomic psychiatry. He is also interested in investigating other emergent depression treatments. In particular, he seeks to analyze the rise of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in the shadow of ECT, and to ask how depressed people are constituted as political subjects in this research.

Anna Jabloner received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her research centers on the socio-cultural dimensions of techno-science from a feminist perspective, on race and gender in American science, and on the theories of nature that inform the expanding field of digital biology. Her dissertation work examined genomics as a culturally situated phenomenon of knowledge production and consumption. It tracked how genomics’ different applications are currently used in biomedicine, and imagined as useful as revolutionary infrastructure for health and the future. In prior research, Jabloner studied feminist epistemology, publishing a book on Donna Haraway’s approaches to race titled Implodierende Grenzen: ‘Race’ und Ethnizitaet in Donna Haraways Technowissenschaft (Passagen, 2005). Her participation in the study of team science (PI: Lee) at SCBE extended her interest in the ethnographic analysis of local cultures of techno-science, and traced how social and collaborative processes shape the formation of knowledge.

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