Speakers and Panelists 

Dr. Alex John London, Carnegie Mellon University
Alex John London, Ph.D., is the Clara L. West professor of ethics and philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. An elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, his work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. His book, For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics, is available as an open access title from Oxford University Press (2021) and he was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Group on Ethics and Governance of AI whose report “Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health” was published in 2021. 

Dr. Elisabeth Hildt, Illinois Institute of Technology
Elisabeth Hildt, Ph.D. is the professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology. She is interested in philosophical and ethical aspects of science and technology. Her research focuses on bioethics, ethics and technology, neurophilosophy, neuroethics, and ethical aspects of artificial intelligence. After having completed her studies in biochemistry, she became a fellow of the post-graduate program Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tübingen, where she did her doctorate writing a thesis on personal identity issues in neural grafting. Afterwards, she was the scientific coordinator of the interdisciplinary project European Network for Biomedical Ethics. After several years of post-doctoral experience at the University of Munich she was an assistant professor at the Chair for Ethics in the Life Sciences at the University of Tübingen. From 2008 to summer 2014, Hildt was the head of the Research Group on Neuroethics/Neurophilosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Mainz.

Dr. RJ Nowling, Milwaukee School of Engineering
RJ Nowling, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of computer science at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE). In collaboration with students and external research groups, Nowling applies machine learning and data science to genomic data with the goal of extracting interpretable knowledge. Nowling earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Notre Dame and B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Eckerd College. He teaches courses in data science, machine learning and algorithms.

Dr. Karola Kreitmair, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Dr. Karola Kreitmair joined the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health in 2018 after receiving her Ph.D. in Philosophy and serving as a clinical ethics fellow at Stanford University. She has broad ranging interests, including clinical ethics, research ethics, and neuroethics. Recent scholarly work has included consciousness and neuroethics, the rationing of scarce health care resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, and ethical issues arising from in direct-to-consumer digital behavioral technology. Kreitmair is a member of the UW Hospital Ethics Committee and performs clinical ethics consults for the UW Hospital and for American Children’s Hospital. She served as a member of the UW Hospital’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Ethics Team, which worked to develop protocols for critical care rationing at UW Hospital in 2020, and on the Ventilator Allocation Advisory Workgroup for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

Dr. Michael Zimmer, Marquette University
Dr. Michael Zimmer is a privacy and data ethics scholar whose work focuses on digital privacy and surveillance, the ethics of big data, internet research ethics, and the broader social and ethical dimensions of emerging digital technologies. He is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University, and director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society. He is an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, as well as the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute.

Dr. Kathleen Schmainda, Medical College of Wisconsin
Kathleen Schmainda, Ph.D. is a professor of biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Dr. Brian Patterson, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, UW Health
Brian Patterson, MD, MPH, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine and physician informatics director of predictive analytics for the BerbeeWalsh Emergency Department at UW Health.