NRD 2021 presents…
Ethics of Neurotech Panel
Gabriel Lazaro-Munoz, PH.D., J.D., M.B.E.
Gabe Lázaro is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine. In his research, Dr. Lázaro-Muñoz combines his background in neuroscience, law, and bioethics to examine the social implications of emerging biomedical technologies in neuroscience and genomics.Dr. Lázaro-Muñoz is Chair of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics Ethics Committee and visiting professor of Neuroethics in the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Lázaro-Muñoz obtained a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Professor Joseph LeDoux’s laboratory at New York University, where he studied neural pathways involved in the acquisition, storage, and behavioral expression of memories associated with fear-motivated actions. Dr. Lázaro-Muñoz has a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and is a licensed attorney. He also has a Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and a B.A. in psychology from the University of Puerto Rico.
Tim Brown, PhD
Dr. Brown is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate working primarily on a National Institutes of Health–funded project on the effect of neurotechnologies on user agency. Further, he is long-time contributor to the Center for Neurotechnology's (CNT) Neuroethics Thrust—where he supports efforts to teach neuroethics to young investigators, catalyze ethics investigations through interdisciplinary collaborations, and promote the field of neuroethics through public outreach. More generally, Tim's work lies at the intersection of biomedical ethics, philosophy of technology, (black/latinx/queer) feminism, and aesthetics.
Laura Cabrera, PhD
Laura Cabrera's interests focus on the ethical and societal implications of neurotechnology and neuroscientific advances. She has been working on projects that explore the media coverage and the attitudes of the general public toward pharmacological and neuromodulation interventions for the treatment of psychiatric disorders. She has also worked on the public perceptions toward the use of different modalities of neuromodifiers for enhancement purposes, as well as their normative implications.
Her current work also focuses on Latinos’ views about Alzheimer's disease, as well as the timing of deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease.
Jackie Sullivan, PhD (Panel Moderator)
Jacqueline Sullivan has a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science and a MS in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research is situated at the intersection of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science and has its origin in a single basic question: What light does contemporary neuroscience shed on the relationship between mind and brain? While she takes this to be an empirical question, she believes that philosophers of science have an important role to play in answering it, namely by shedding light on how neuroscience works. To this end, the project at the heart of her research program is to develop and refine a conceptual framework for evaluating experiments and understanding the nature of different kinds of practices (e.g., collaborative, conceptual, integrative, methodological, open-science) in the neurosciences of cognition and determining the implications of these practices for knowledge production in these areas of science.