Photo by Susan Blackburn
Michelle N. Meyer, PhD, JD, is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director, Research Ethics, in the Center for Translational Bioethics and Health Care Policy at Geisinger, a large, integrated health system in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She is also Faculty Co-Director of the Applied Behavioral Insights team in Geisinger’s new Steele Institute for Health Innovation, which both designs, implements, and rigorously evaluates the effects of provider- and patient-facing “nudges” in the field and investigates stakeholder attitudes towards health nudges. She uses mixed methods to investigate judgments and decision-making among stakeholders in research and healthcare, including research participants, IRBs, health care providers, and patients. Her current areas of active research include comparative effectiveness of different approaches to informed consent; information avoidance (especially in genetic/genomic and health-related contexts); attitudes to research and other learning activities — including experimentation, biobank research, research comparing standards of care, and "sensitive" secondary research; attitudes towards and the effects of "nudges"; and many aspects of IRB decision-making, especially risk-benefit analysis. In addition to pursuing her own research, she chairs Geisinger's IRB Leadership Committee and directs its Research Ethics Advice and Consulting Service.
Immediately before joining the faculty at Geisinger, Michelle was an Assistant Professor and Director of Bioethics Policy in the Clarkson University–Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine Bioethics Program and Adjunct Faculty at Albany Law School, where she taught Law and Bioethics, Public Health Ethics, Advanced Bioethics Policy: Philosophical, Economic, and Psychological Foundations, and a survey of contemporary policy issues in the biosciences. Previously, she was an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, and a Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Michelle's writing at the intersection of science and society has appeared in leading journals of bioethics (American Journal of Bioethics, Hastings Center Report, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal), law (Harvard Law Review, Administrative Law Review), and science (Nature, PNAS), as well as in popular media outlets (New York Times, Slate, Wired, Los Angeles Times, and Forbes.com). She currently sits on the editorial board of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, the Board of Directors of Open Humans Foundation (formerly PersonalGenomes.org), a nonprofit organization that has developed novel ways of managing the ethical, legal, and technical aspects of creating open access repositories of highly identifiable human genomic data; the Advisory Board of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium; the Scientific Advisory Board of Making Science Less WEIRD; and the Ethics and Compliance Advisory Board of PatientsLikeMe.
Michelle earned a Ph.D. in religious studies, with a focus on practical ethics, from the University of Virginia under the supervision of James F. Childress and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a founding co-editor of the Harvard Law Review Forum. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Stanley Marcus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, where she studied religious studies, philosophy, and creative nonfiction.
Immediately before joining the faculty at Geisinger, Michelle was an Assistant Professor and Director of Bioethics Policy in the Clarkson University–Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine Bioethics Program and Adjunct Faculty at Albany Law School, where she taught Law and Bioethics, Public Health Ethics, Advanced Bioethics Policy: Philosophical, Economic, and Psychological Foundations, and a survey of contemporary policy issues in the biosciences. Previously, she was an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, and a Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Michelle's writing at the intersection of science and society has appeared in leading journals of bioethics (American Journal of Bioethics, Hastings Center Report, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal), law (Harvard Law Review, Administrative Law Review), and science (Nature, PNAS), as well as in popular media outlets (New York Times, Slate, Wired, Los Angeles Times, and Forbes.com). She currently sits on the editorial board of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, the Board of Directors of Open Humans Foundation (formerly PersonalGenomes.org), a nonprofit organization that has developed novel ways of managing the ethical, legal, and technical aspects of creating open access repositories of highly identifiable human genomic data; the Advisory Board of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium; the Scientific Advisory Board of Making Science Less WEIRD; and the Ethics and Compliance Advisory Board of PatientsLikeMe.
Michelle earned a Ph.D. in religious studies, with a focus on practical ethics, from the University of Virginia under the supervision of James F. Childress and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a founding co-editor of the Harvard Law Review Forum. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Stanley Marcus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, where she studied religious studies, philosophy, and creative nonfiction.