Gail Geller, Sc.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, with primary affiliations in the Bioethics Institute and the Institute of Genetic Medicine. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Health Policy and Management where she is a core faculty member in the Genetic Counseling Training Program and directs a course on “Ethical & Sociocultural Issues in Genetic & Reproductive Technologies”. She received her B.S. from Cornell University and her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health with concentrations in bioethics and behavioral sciences. She has spent the last decade conducting empirical research on the ethical and psychosocial implications of the Human Genome Project. She has been a member of two NIH Consortia: the Cancer Genetics Studies Consortium and the Informed Consent Consortium, and co-chaired the Task Force on Informed Consent for Cancer Susceptibility Testing. Although her primary research focus has been informed consent for genetic testing, she also has longstanding interests in the areas of medical socialization, provider-patient communication under conditions of uncertainty, and cultural differences in attitudes and practices regarding health and disease. Dr. Geller has become increasingly involved in the area of complementary & alternative medicine ( CAM), and the ethical and philosophical issues it raises. She received a prestigious Kornfeld Fellowship to explore the intersection of bioethics and CAM. She co-directs the educational component of the Johns Hopkins CAM Center. She is also the ethics representative on the Data Safety & Monitoring Board of the National Center for Complementary & Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). She is an adjunct faculty member at the Tai Sophia Institute where she co-teaches “Rethinking Science and Research for the 21st Century” in their Masters Program in the Applied Healing Arts. Dr. Geller currently serves on an IRB and is a member of the Ethics Working Group of the National Children’s Study. She has served as a consultant to the Informed Consent Working Group of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing, the Consensus Panel on “Emerging Ethical Issues in Smoking and Genetics,” the CDC’s Program in Public Health Genetics, and the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. In addition to several journal articles, her scholarly achievements include authorship of The ethics of predictive genetic testing in prevention trials involving adolescents, and co-authorship of Recruitment of pregnant, minor adolescents and minor adolescents at risk of pregnancy into longitudinal, observational research: The case of the National Children’s Study, both in E. Kodish, ed, Ethics and Research With Children (forthcoming), co-authorship of Feminism, bioethics & genetics in S. Wolf, ed, Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction, as well as co-authorship and co-editorship of AIDS, Women and the Next Generation: Towards a Morally Acceptable Public Policy for HIV Testing of Pregnant Women and Newborns (all by Oxford University Press). |
