Barbara Koenig, PhD

Barbara A. Koenig, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Bioethics and Medical Anthropology, University of California, San Francisco, where prior to her retirement she directed the UCSF Program in Bioethics. Prior to that she helped found bioethics programs at the Mayo Clinic and Stanford University. A medical anthropologist by disciplinary background, Prof. Koenig pioneered the use of empirical methods in the study of ethical questions in science, medicine, and health. That work targets emerging genomic technologies. Her work on deliberative democracy as a strategy to engage communities in biobank design and governance informed the creation of the Mayo Clinic Biobank. Throughout her career, Prof. Koenig has been an active participant in health and science policy, having served on the ethics committee that advises the director of the CDC as well as the Department of Health and Human Services “Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing.” Data sharing practice is another long-standing interest: she served on a university-wide “Health Data Governance Task Force” that advised the University of California’s president; that report argued for a justice-based approach to health data use. The dynamic intersection of cultural and biological categories of human difference led to the publication of the volume: Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. That interest continues in her work with the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium—an NIH project that seeks to build a novel reference genome reflecting the full range of human diversity. Koenig is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center, was a faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, a residential fellow at the Rockefeller Bellagio Study Center, and a visiting scholar at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland.