Dr Jantina de Vries

University of Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa

Jantina is co-PI of the H3Africa ELSI Collaborative Centre IFGENERA which investigates ethical and practical challenges in the return of individual genetic research results in African genomics research. She is the former Chair of the H3Africa Working Group on Ethics. Jantina is Associate Professor in Bioethics at the Department of Medicine of the University of Cape Town. Her work focuses on developing ethical best practice for genomics research in Africa. Amongst others, she has contributed to developing an evidence base for best practice in informed consent for African genomics research, investigating ethical challenges relating to the sharing of African samples and data, exploring what constitutes fairness in African genomics research collaborations, and studying how genomic research may impact on stigma relating to disease. She combines qualitative and quantitative sociological research with normative and theoretical analysis. Whilst actively contributing to academic literature that explores ethical challenges in African genomics research, a second and equally important output relates to the translation of her work into forward-looking policies and best practice guidelines that are used in the regulation of genomics research on the African continent. Jantina obtained her DPhil through The Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford (2011), and MSc degrees in sociology at Wageningen University (2003) and the European University Institute (2004). She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Human Genetics Department at UCT (2011-2013). She was previously the ethics coordinator for MalariaGEN. Her PhD explored questions around ethnic stigmatisation in population genomic research in Africa. She is a member of the H3Africa Steering Committee, of the Regulatory and Ethics Working Group of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, and of the WWARN Data Access Committee. She is also a Board member of the Public Population Project in Genomics and Society (P3G).