Post Doctoral Fellows

Stehanie Alessi Kraft received her J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law with a concentration in Law and Health Sciences. During law school, Stephanie was a legal research fellow for the UCSF/UC Hastings Consortium on Law, Science and Health Policy, where she worked with a team to author a white paper on strategies for improvement in healthcare price transparency. She has also published a law review article on the return of genetic results to research participants. Her research interests include social, ethical, and legal perspectives on informed consent, research ethics, and behavioral genetics. Prior to attending law school, Stephanie graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics. She is now a post-doctoral fellow at CIRGE.

Megan Allyse received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from the University of Nottingham, where she studied ethics and science policy related to oocyte donation in California, the UK, and China. Her research interests include normativity in public and social policy, intercultural ethical comparisons, and public health ethics and policy. She was a post-doctoral fellow at CIRGE.

Megan is now a Law and Biosciences Fellow at the Institute for Genome Science and Policy at Duke University.

Teneille Brown, J.D., is an attorney who received her undergraduate degree in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania (mcl BA, 2000) with a concentration in bioethics. While at Penn, she wrote an honors thesis on the ethics of elective cosmetic surgery and conducted HIV clinical research. She conducted research at the Penn Bioethics Center, and drafted a bill on genetic testing informed consent.

Teneille attended the University of Michigan law school (JD 2004), focusing on bioethics and medicine and the law. She assisted in the creation of the Pediatric Advocacy Initiative, a legal clinic that offered free services to More  area patients.

Teneille practiced law for two years at the law firm of Latham & Watkins, LLP in Washington, DC, where she practiced in the Health Care and Life Sciences group, representing early-stage pharmaceutical and device companies.

At CIRGE, Teneille researched the role of behavioral genetics in 4th, 8th, and 14th Amendment jurisprudence, against the back-drop of distributive justice and civil rights objectives. She is particularly interested in the disparity in legal treatment of mental illness, depending perhaps on the underlying genetic basis of the disorder. While she will be researching the genetics of alcohol use and how this information is used in the courts, she is also interested in the admissibility of genetics data generally.

In 2009, Teneille left SCBE to join the faculty at S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah as Associate Professor of Law.

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Jennifer McCormick, Ph.D., graduated from Ohio Northern University (B.S., 1991) and got her PhD in biology from the University of Michigan in 1997. She did postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan Medical School Department of Biological Chemistry and in 2004 was awarded a master of public policy degree from the University of Michigan's G.R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Between 2001 and 2002, she managed a state-wide commercialization initiative (funded by the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor Fund) for one of UM's Associate VP for Research. She was a lecturer in the Ford School of More  Public Policy, teaching courses in science policy. For the past year she worked with Jason Owen-Smith, Professor of Sociology University of Michigan, on a project examining the impact of the August 9, 2001 hESC policy on hESC research in the US and is co-author of a forthcoming book on national science policy with Homer Neal, Professor of Physics University of Michigan, and Toby Smith, Sr Federal Relations Officer Association of American Universities, entitled "Beyond Sputnik: U.S. Science Policy in the 21st Century" (University of Michigan Press). The book is intended to reach a broad audience - scientists, policymakers, students in an introductory science policy course, and even the general public.

Jennifer is an active member of Women In Neuroscience, the American Association of University Women, and Society for Neuroscience. One of her proudest accomplishments is bringing to Ann Arbor the Brains Rule Neuroscience Expo. She co-organized this science education outreach program from 2001 to 2004 and participated in establishing it as an annual event.

Jennifer is now an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Associate Consultant at Mayo Clinic and college of Medicine.

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Lauren Milner received her Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Oregon Health and Science University, where she studied the role individual genes play in alcohol physical dependence and withdrawal. She has published and presented her research in national and international journals and venues, and is active in educational outreach activities related to psychology and neuroscience. She was a post-doctoral fellow at CIRGE.

Lauren is now an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Institutes of Health Office of Director (OD), Office of Science Policy (OSP), and the Office of Clinical Research and Bioethics Policy

Nanibaa’ Garrison earned her Ph.D. in Genetics at Stanford University and her undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona in Molecular and Cellular Biology with minors in American Indian Studies and Psychology. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on the genetic architecture of human hair and skin pigmentation. Her research interests include genetic research on Native communities, human genetic ancestry and evolutionary history, and issues with privacy and confidentiality. She was a post-doctoral fellow at CIRGE.

Nanibaa is now an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics on the Investigator (Tenure) Track working in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at the Vanderbilt University in the School of Medicine.

Marsha Michie received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has conducted qualitative research on families of children with genetic disorders, on the understandings and self-perceptions of genetic research participants, and on individual and community religious identities. Her dissertation was a long-term ethnography of an independent Pentecostal church community in North Carolina. Her current research, supported by a training grant from NHGRI, examines the social and ethical implications of noninvasive prenatal genetic testing. She is a post-doctoral fellow at CIRGE.

Holly Tabor, Ph.D., majored Epidemiology with a minor in Genetics at Stanford in 2002. Her research focused on candidate gene approaches to the study of complex diseases and traits, including heart disease, resistance to HIV infection, and autism.

From 2002-2005 Holly was a Senior Scientist at the Stanford Human Genome Center, working with Rick Myers. There she directed the Genetics Group in candidate gene approaches to the study of heart disease, hypertension, insulin resistance and Parkinson's Disease. Holly has also worked on large scale epidemiological studies at More  UCSF and at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Holly is interested in ethical issues involved in the study of complex diseases. She is particularly interested in ethical issues surrounding autism.

Holly is now an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Bioethics at the University of Washington.  

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