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Sara Gerke, Assistant Professor of Law, Penn State Dickinson Skip to Content
Sara Gerke
Sara Gerke

Assistant Professor of Law, Penn State Dickinson Law

Research Fellow in Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Law Alumnus
2018-2021


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Sara Gerke joined Penn State Dickinson Law as Assistant Professor of Law in July 2021. Her current research focuses on the ethical and legal challenges of artificial intelligence and big data for health care and health law in the United States and Europe. She also researches comparative law and ethics of other issues at the cutting edge of medical developments, such as the clinical translation of stem cell research, biological products, such as somatic cells, tissues, and gene therapy, reproductive medicine, such as mitochondrial replacement techniques, and digital health more generally.

Professor Gerke is the Co-Principal Investigator of the study of the legal and ethical implications raised by AI-assisted surgery in the interdisciplinary project CLASSICA (Validating AI in Classifying Cancer in Real-Time Surgery). This four-year project is funded by the European Union through the Horizon Europe funding program with a total of €6 million for four years with 11 partners from nine countries. She also spearheads, as Co-Principal Investigator, the study on addressing ethical and legal concerns raised by AI in colonoscopy in the interdisciplinary project OperA (Optimizing Colorectal Cancer Prevention Through Personalized Treatment With Artificial Intelligence). This five-year project consists of 18 partners from 13 countries and received €6 million in funding (i.e., €4.7 million from Horizon Europe and the remainder from a U.K. funding body). Professor Gerke is also a leadership team member of the Project on Precision Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and the Law (PMAIL) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Professor Gerke is also the Co-Investigator of the supplemental project “PREMIERE: A PREdictive Model Index and Exchange Repository” supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health. This project is also supported in part by the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University and explores the ethics of synthetic data and the utility of ELSI-focused computational checklists for biomedical AI/ML. 

Professor Gerke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading law, medical, scientific, and bioethics journals, such as The George Washington Law Review, Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics, JAMA, Science, Nature Medicine, npj Digital Medicine, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Biotechnology, The Lancet Digital Health, Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Hastings Center Report, and The American Journal of Bioethics, as well as books published by Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, and Springer. She is also the first editor of a stakeholder book on the clinical application of human induced pluripotent stem cells published with Springer in 2020.

Professor Gerke was also recently named a 2021 Health Law Scholar by the American Society for Law, Medicine & Ethics and the Saint Louis University School of Law Center for Health Law Studies.

At Penn State Dickinson Law, Professor Gerke teaches Torts, Health Care Law & Policy, and Food and Drug Law. With her expertise in the ethics and law of AI, big data, and digital health, she has also been frequently invited as a guest lecturer at other schools, such as Harvard Medical School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and McGill University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Professor Gerke previously served as a Research Fellow in Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Law at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, where she oversaw the day-to-day work of the PMAIL project, including conducting law, policy, and ethics research; drafting reports and recommendations; and coordinating the Center’s efforts with collaborators at the Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL) at the University of Copenhagen as well as other partners. Before joining the Petrie-Flom Center, Professor Gerke was the General Manager of the Institute for German, European and International Medical Law, Public Health Law and Bioethics of the Universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim (IMGB).