Alex McKeown

I am a Research Fellow with the Neuroscience, Ethics & Society team (NEUROSEC) and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and the Humanities (WEH), currently working on the UKRI Pandemic Ethics Accelerator, providing rapid ethics analysis to challenges arising in the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to 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 Ethics and Society Small 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 artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine, epistemology - especially debates in realism and anti-realism, 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.