Alex McKeown

I am an academic visitor with the Neuroscience, Ethics & Society team (NEUROSEC), where I worked from 2017 to 2023 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, before leaving full-time academia from 2024 onwards. As well as my visiting position, I now work full-time as Head of Data Ethics for the consultancy firm Information Governance Services. 

While working as a Fellow at NEUROSEC my roles included a role as Deputy Director of the UKRI Pandemic Ethics Accelerator, which provided rapid ethics analysis to challenges arising in the COVID-19 pandemic. As well as this I worked on the MRC Mental Health Data Pathfinder which aims to harness health informatics and data science to improve mental health outcomes, and the EU ROADMAP project which sought to use Real World Data to improve outcomes in Alzheimer's disease.

Previously I held teaching and research positions at the University of Bristol Centre for Ethics in Medicine, as well as research positions at University College London Medical School Research Department for Medical Education, and the University of East London Institute for Health and Human Development. I am a visiting tutor at the Yale University Summer Institute in Bioethics.

I have a PhD in Bioethics from the University of Bristol. My thesis focused on the philosophical, ethical, and social implications of human enhancement technologies. I was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to take forward the conclusions of my thesis, examining the relation between human enhancement and public health, which remains a significant research interest.

Alongside this my interests include neuroethics and neurotechnologies, ethics in psychiatry and mental health, ethics in data and artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine, epistemology, and interdisciplinary methodology in applied and empirical ethics. 

Before returning to academia to take my PhD I spent three years working in patient advocacy and policy research, and prior to this I took a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Healthcare Ethics at the University of Leeds.