Barbara Prainsack - Biography#

Barbara Prainsack is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, and at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. In Vienna she directs the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS). Her work explores the social, regulatory and ethical dimensions of biomedicine and bioscience, with current research projects focusing on personalised and “precision” medicine, on citizen participation in science and medicine, and the role of solidarity in medicine and healthcare.

Barbara is a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Committee advising the federal government in Vienna, of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies advising the European Commission, and she chaired the European Science Foundation’s (ESF) Forward Look on Personalised Medicine for the European Citizen (2011-2012, with Stephen Holgate and Aarno Palotie). She is also a member of the British Royal Society of Arts, and an elected foreign member of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters. She is an affiliate of the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRE), University of Montreal, Canada, and of the the Centre for Health, Law, and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) at the University of Oxford.