Vasiliki Rahimzadeh
Vasiliki (Vaso) Rahimzadeh, PhD is an applied bioethics scholar with research interests at the intersection of precision medicine, data governance and public policy. Combining deliberative democratic methods with critical policy analysis, her research examines how regulations governing emerging health information technologies can enable the exchange of research and health-related data more widely, efficiently and securely.
After earning her Bachelor of Science in Microbial Biology from the University in California Berkeley in 2012, she pursued graduate studies at McGill University where she completed an MSc (2014), followed by a PhD (2019) with a specialization in biomedical ethics. My dissertation research first developed, then validated an ethical-legal framework for the responsible sharing of genomic and associated clinical data in Canada. Her work in this area was supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2016-2019) and was awarded both the Governor General’s Gold Medal and Gordon A. MacLachlan Prizes for best dissertation in the biological and health sciences. She joined the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019 with support from a National Human Genome Research Institute’s Ethical Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program training grant. In addition to her published research contributions in journals such as JAMA Pediatrics, American Journal of Bioethics and European Journal of Human Genetics, she is an active member of the Regulatory and Ethics Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health where she contributes empirical policy research on harmonization and standards-development for health data sharing.