Alex McKeown

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Neuroscience, Ethics & Society team (NEUROSEC) and the Big Data Institute (BDI), working on the MRC Pathfinder project which aims to harness health informatics and data science to improve mental health outcomes.

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 these my research interests include neuroethics and neurotechnologies, ethics in psychiatry and mental health, philosophy of medicine, epistemology - in particular 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 in genetics, and prior to this I took a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Healthcare Ethics at the University of Leeds.