Professor Bronwyn Parry

Biography

Professor Bronwyn Parry is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. She is currently the Dean of The Australian National University's College of Arts and Social Sciences.

Before this, she was a Professor of Global Health & Social Medicine at King's, as well as Co-Director of the King’s Sanctuary Programme, supporting the university’s response to the global issue of forced displacement. The King's Sanctuary Programme was formed in 2015 in response to the global issue of forced displacement, which affects more than 60 million people worldwide. It initiates and leads on projects that create positive opportunities for young people whose education has been disrupted due to being displaced and includes the Partnership for Digital Learning and Increased Access (PADILEIA), Sanctuary Scholarships and the King’s Refugee Community Sponsorship Scheme.

Research

• The rise and operation of the life sciences industry,
• Informationalism
• The commodification of life forms
• Posthumanism
• Applied bioethics
• Legal approaches to the regulation of nature
• Public understanding and reception of science

Bronwyn's first book, 'Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-information' revealed how biological materials are collected for use in the US pharmaceutical industry and how the engineered artefacts derived from them (i.e. cell lines, tissues samples and sequenced DNA) are then traded internationally as part of a new global resource economy in ‘bio-information.’

She subsequently received a major grant from the Wellcome Trust to investigate the social, ethical and legal complexities that attend the creation and operation of human tissue banks in the UK, completing this work through a three-year ethnography of the Addenbrooke’s Hospital Brain bank.

As part of her wider commitment to promoting the visual arts as a medium for communicating complex ethical issues in science to a wider public, she mounted a groundbreaking interactive exhibition 'Mind Over Matter' with the artist Ania Dabrowska in 2011, which explored attitudes to memory loss and brain donation for dementia research.

Bronwyn was elected to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 2007 and has contributed to reports on the forensic use of bio-information, the recent crisis in public health in the UK and dementia care. She has also undertaken comparative work on the role of international regulatory regimes and acted as a consultant for the United Nations and the UK government in this capacity.

Bronwyn’s primary research interests lie in investigating how human-environment relations are being re-cast by technological, economic and regulatory change.

She is about to embark on a new collaborative international bioethics project that investigates the production, consumption and regulation of assisted reproductive services in rural and urban centres within India. 

Further details

See Bronwyn's research profile