Multidisciplinary Perspectives on CRISPR

George J. Annas, JD, MPH
BU School of Medicine and School of Law
Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights, School of Public Health

George Annas is Warren Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights of Boston University School of Public Health, and a Professor in the Boston University School of Medicine, and School of Law. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and former member of the National Academies Human Rights Committee.

George Annas’ SPH Profile, CAMED Profile, LAW Profile

Rachell Powell, PhD, JD, MS
CAS, Philosophy
Center for Philosophy & History of Science

Prior to her appointment at BU, Dr. Powell was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University, and a James Martin Research Fellow at the Institute for Science and Ethics also at Oxford University. Before that she was a Greenwall Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Visiting Professor at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.

Dr. Powell has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt University, and the Center for Genetic Engineering and Society at North Carolina State University.

She has been a Principal Investigator on collaborative and solo grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. From 2011-2016 she was as Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics (British Medical Journal Group), and she is currently serving as an Associate Editor of Philosophy & Technology.

Rachell Powell’s Profile

Christopher Schmitt, PhD
CAS, Anthropology, Biology, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Sensory Morphology and Anthropological Genomics Lab

Prof. Schmitt is a primatologist whose research focuses on understanding adaptive responses to environmental extremes using genetics and genomics methods in two wild primate taxa (savanna monkeys across Africa; and yellow-tailed woolly monkeys in Perú). He specializes in portable and accessible long-read sequencing methods on the Oxford Nanopore platform to enable local capacity building and training in genetics methods in primate host countries.

Chris Schmitt’s Profile and personal website
Sensory Morphology and Anthropological Genomics Lab

Julia TCW, PhD
BU School of Medicine
Laboratory of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapeutics

Dr. Julia TCW is an Assistant Professor at Boston University and a Director of the Laboratory of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapeutics. She received Ph.D. and A.M. in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology from Harvard University and research studies in iPSC reprogramming in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. She then perused her postdoctoral research in the Department of Neuroscience, Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s Disease at Mount Sinai, New York. Her research focuses on studying Alzheimer’s disease genetics and functional genomics especially APOE using computational approaches and human iPSC models and developing therapeutic modalities. She achieved Druckenmiller Fellowship award from New York Stem Cell Foundation, K and R awards from NIH-NIA, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Award from BrightFocus Foundation and selected as 2022 Toffler Scholar from Karen Toffler Charitable Trust.  

Julia TCW’s Profile
TCW Laboratory

Meg A. Younger, PhD
CAS, Biology
Center for Systems Neuroscience, Neurophotonics Center

Meg joined the Boston University faculty in January of 2022. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and an affiliate of the Center for Systems Neuroscience and the Neurophotonics Center. Meg received a BS in Neural Science in 2004 from New York University. As an undergraduate, she worked with Justin Blau at New York University on circadian rhythms in Drosophila and with David Spray at Albert Einstein College of Medicine on mammalian gap junction channels. She then earned a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco in 2013, working with Graeme Davis, where she studied the homeostatic regulation of neurotransmitter release in Drosophila. She conducted her postdoctoral research with Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller University/HHMI where she focused on the neurobiology of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Her postdoctoral work combined genetic approaches, neuroanatomy, and two-photon calcium imaging to study the mosquito sensory neurobiology that underlies two reproductive behaviors, the search for a person to bite and the selection of a site to lay eggs. Meg was awarded the Sherrington, Charles Barbeiri, and Phi Beta Kappa Research prizes for her undergraduate research and a Genentech Fellowship for her graduate work. She was a 2014 Grass Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She was awarded a Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellowship in 2015, a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2016, and a Kavli Neural Systems Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2018. In 2022 Meg was named a Searle Scholar and a recipient of a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in Neuroscience, and in 2023 she received a Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research.

Meg Younger’s Profile
Younger Lab

A Code of Ethics for Gene Drive Research, George J. Annas, et al., 2021

Summary of First International Summit on Gene Editing

2023 International Summit on Gene Editing