Postgraduate Student Council

Princess Banda (She/her)

Co-chair/Better Bioethics Lead

Princess is a socio-medical anthropologist who, amongst many things, is primarily a writer, educator, and researcher. Princess is currently a DPhil Anthropology student at the University of Oxford and is cultivating a research pathway which embraces the intersections and entanglements between socio-medical anthropology, women's health, racial and social justice, and critical qualitative research methods. Her areas of interest include racial health disparities, socio-structural and political determinants of health, biopolitics, biopsychosociality, and maternal health. Her doctoral thesis explores how obstetric racism is not only a significant risk factor in UK Black women's intergenerational experiences of violent and unethical maternal health, but how obstetric racism is a kind of biopolitics which reflects the UK's wider politics of race and anti-Blackness. In doing so, Princess is exploring critical ethnographic and qualitative mixed methods which are rooted in Black feminist politics of sisterhood and ethics of care, ultimately utilising narratives, life histories, and 'hybrid ethnography' as primary methods.

Kumeri Bandara (She/her)

Kumeri is a PhD candidate at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford. Her research explores ethical challenges faced by migrant staff in UK care homes and relevant ethics support. She is interested in migration, care ethics, feminist ethics, and decolonial approaches to ethics research.

Sally Barker (She/her)

Co-secretary

Sally is a junior doctor based in London. Alongside part-time clinical work in Palliative Medicine, she is currently pursuing a masters in Medical Ethics and Law at Kings College London. She is particularly interested in research around palliative care provision for patients who lack capacity or face barriers to making their wishes known.

Caitriona Cox (She/her)

PGBC 2024 Conference Chair

Caitriona is an academic clinical fellow who splits her time between bioethics research and clinical training in internal medicine. She is working towards a PhD at Cambridge, exploring the ethical issues surrounding the communication of diagnostic uncertainty. She is chair of the PGBC24 committee and runs the Alumni Mentoring Network.

Ruth Goh

Co-secretary

Ruth Goh is a PhD candidate at Imperial College London who is investigating public health ethics and policy, with an interest in tobacco control, respiratory health and child health. She is the current co-secretary of the Postgraduate Student Council.

Natalie Michaux

Co-chair

Emma Nance (She/her)

Emma is a second-year PhD student on the Wellcome Trust funded programme One Health Models of Disease: Science, Ethics, and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Her current work examines the bioethical implications of human and non-human biosurveillance with a view towards integrating and updating the policies under a One Health and global justice framework. She was co-chair of the PGBC23 conference.

Joshua Parker

Jannieke Simons (She/her)

Jannieke is a PhD student at the University Medical Centre Utrecht in The Netherlands. With a BSc in Nanobiology and an MA in Applied Ethics, her particular interest in the ethics of biotechnological and biomedical innovations comes as no surprise. Her PhD research investigates the ethical dimensions of human somatic prime editing therapy for inherited cardiomyopathies.

Matimba Swana (She/her)

Matimba is doing a PhD at the University of Bristol. This PhD project is investigating the ethical and regulatory complexity of human nanoswarm cancer clinical trials.

Rachel Thompson

Rachel is undertaking a PhD in Research Ethics at Swansea University.

Lydia Tsiakiri (She/her)

Social Media & Website Manager/Alumni Network Lead

Lydia is a Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her current research focuses on public health ethics, deontological ethics, discrimination, distributive justice, and personal responsibility in the health and healthcare context through the lens of an integrated empirical ethics approach. She is our web manager and runs the Alumni Mentoring Network.

Jamie Webb (He/him)

Jamie Webb is a PhD student in the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Technomoral Futures, working on the ethics of artificial intelligence in healthcare resource allocation within the field of empirical bioethics. Jamie was previously a research associate in the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has a BA in Philosophy and an MSci in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Bioethics from NYU, where he studied on a Fulbright scholarship. He was co-chair of the PGBC23 conference.

Lucy Yanow (She/her)

Lucy Yanow recently completed her MSc in Bioethics and Society at King’s College London. Her dissertation, the Haunted Womb; Ghost Dancing Post Roe vs. Wade won the prize for best performance in her cohort. Previous to returning to academia, she was an unlicensed reproductive carer in the California Bay Area; a full spectrum doula, a home birth midwife apprentice, and a social work associate at the Women’s Options Center, the abortion clinic at San Francisco General Hospital. Her research interests include care ethics, feminist science and technology studies, relational autonomy and post-humanism. She hopes to start PhD research in fall 2024.

Shengyu Zhao (She/her)

Shengyu Zhao is a PhD student at the Centre for Ethics in Medicine, University of Bristol. Her research interests broadly encompass transcultural and cross-cultural bioethics, with a specific focus on palliative care and end-of-life decision-making. Her current project centres on exploring ethical challenges in palliative care within Mainland China.