Michelle N. Meyer Named to Board of Directors of PersonalGenomes.org
Academic Fellow alumna Michelle Meyer, J.D., Ph.D., currently Assistant Professor and Director of Bioethics Policy in the Union Graduate College-Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Siniar Bioethics Program, has been named to the Board of Directors of PersonalGenomes.org (PG.org), a 501(c)(3) charitable organization dedicated to creating and publicly sharing highly (re)identifiable genomic, health, and trait data critical to scientific progress, and to develop novel legal, ethical and technical ways of doing so. PG.org was created in 2008 to support the Personal Genome Project (PGP), which was begun in 2005 by Harvard geneticist George Church, a leader in the Human Genome Project during the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the PGP has grown to a global network of sites including not only PGP-Harvard, but also PGP-UK, PGP-Canada, and several other sites in development throughout the world. PG.org is also responsible for the annual GET (Genomes, Environments, and Traits) Labs and the GET Conference, which was featured last week in the New York Times. Most recently, PG.org was awarded one million dollars in grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Knight Foundation to design and launch a new project, Open Humans Network, an online system that helps match people willing to share their health data with researchers who would benefit from access to more information, all with a focus on exploring new standards for open health data. Open Humans will initially work with PGP-Harvard, American Gut, and Flu Near You.