Introductions! Meet the TARGeT Team

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We thought we would take a moment to introduce ourselves! Please feel free to get in touch with any of us if you are interested in this project - or others that we're involved with.

In no particular order, here we are, the TARGeT team:

Prof. Ainsley Newson

Professor Ainsley Newson works on the ethical and legal issues that arise in genomics and health. Her work critically considers how genomic technologies should be used well, in research, clinical and population health settings. Within this, she has a particular interest in reproductive ethics. Ainsley supports her work with degree qualifications in bioethics, law and science. In addition to her academicpost as Professor and Deputy Director at Sydney Health Ethics, University of Sydney, Ainsley is a member of several policy-making committees in bioethics and health for government and professional associations and she is an experienced media commentator on bioethics issues. Outside work, she is a parent/logistics co-coordinator to two kids in primary school. She also enjoys the occasional op shop rummage.

Find Ainsley on Twitter @biomedethics or check out her University of Sydney profile page.


Prof. Jackie Leach Scully

Jackie Leach Scully is Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Disability Innovation Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. With an initial training in molecular genetics she held research fellowships in oncology and neurobiology before joining interdisciplinary bioethics research centres in Basel, Switzerland and later at Newcastle University, UK. Her overarching research interest is in how moral attitudes and opinions, particularly about unfamiliar technologies, are developed, and she has pursued this across a range of projects focusing on genomics, reproductive medicine, assistive technologies, organ donation and transplant medicine, forensic science, and humanitarian medicine. Taking feminist bioethics as a model she has developed the idea of disability bioethics to incorporate the engagement of disabled people with biomedical technology, and has been a disability activist for many years. In TARGeT she will use empirical bioethics methodology to explore how attitudes to autonomy are changed -- or not -- in the genomic era.

Find Jackie on Twitter @JLSbioethics or @DisabilityUNSW, or her UNSW profile page.

Dr. Kathryn MacKay

Kathryn MacKay is a Lecturer at Sydney Health Ethics, at the University of Sydney, Australia. Kate completed her Master’s degree in Philosophy with a specialisation in Bioethics at McGill University, Canada, in 2009, and after 5 years working in health promotion, completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK. Kate joined the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University, UK, before permanently joining Sydney Health Ethics. Kate’s research focusses on issues of human flourishing at the intersection of feminist bioethics and moral/political philosophy. She is particularly interested in questions related to power, health & well-being, identity and group relations, and autonomy and agency. She is currently working on the role of mothers within health promotion strategies; the nature of compassion and its possibilities for public health policy and practice; and robust theories of relational autonomy in the context of expanding genetic and assisted reproductive technologies. She is also the host of the SHE Research Podcast.


Find Kathryn on Twitter @KLMacKay or her University of Sydney profile page.


Dr. Rosalind McDougall 

Dr Rosalind McDougall is an ethicist in the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. Rosalind’s research and teaching focus on the ethical challenges faced by health professionals. Her background is in philosophy and qualitative research, and she bring these ideas and approaches to interdisciplinary analysis of issues in patient care.  She has published widely in clinical ethics and reproductive ethics, and is an award-winning educator.  In 2018, she was selected as one of the ABC’s Top 5 researchers in the humanities and social sciences. 

Find Rosalind on Twitter @ethicsros or her University of Melbourne profile page.

Prof. Brenda Wilson

Brenda Wilson is a UK-trained physician with a specialisation in public health. Brenda worked in the NHS and then moved into academia: Universities of Aberdeen and Ottawa before her current position at Memorial University of Newfoundland. As an Associate Dean, Community Health and Humanities, Brenda provides academic leadership in education and research related to population and applied health research and professional public health practice, and supports her institution’s social accountability mandate. 

Brenda's main research interests are about the population and health system implications of emerging genomic technologies: we need credible evidence to inform real-world policy, health system design, professional practice, and to support patients, health care users, and citizens in making decisions for themselves and their families. Brenda has been involved with many Canadian federal and provincial bodies concerned with policy aspects of genetics specifically, public health and disease prevention more generally, and health ethics and the responsible conduct of research. She is a voting member of the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, an independent group that develops and disseminates evidence-based guidelines for primary care practitioners with the goal of promoting well-informed shared decision making about preventive health practices.


A/Prof. Jan Hodgson

Jan Hodgson is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne and Program Director for the Master of Genetic Counselling and the Master of Genomics and Health. Jan coordinates the Counselling and Professional Practice curriculum for both programs and contributes to subjects including genetic counselling practice, biomedical ethics, health communication and research methods.

Jan has worked in a variety of healthcare settings for more than 40 years as a nurse, counsellor, genetic counsellor, educator and academic researcher. Jan’s research interests include prenatal testing, perinatal palliative care and genetic testing. Her PhD research explored women’s experiences of prenatal testing and the role of genetic counselling. She is a Member Scholar of the International Institute of Qualitative Methodology (IIQM) and was a Chief investigator for the PeTALS project (Prenatal Testing: A Longitudinal Study) funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Shepherd Foundation.

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