James Wilson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at UCL. He is also Vice Dean (Interdisciplinarity) for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and co-director of the interdisciplinary UCL Health Humanities Centre. His research focuses on public health ethics, and ethics and governance of health data.
Wilson was PI of the i-sense exploratory project, Building and Maintaining Public Trust in Early Warning Sensing Systems for Influenza. This project examined the ethics and governance of data use in mobile-phone enabled influenza testing, and the ethics of the use of internet data for disease detection. Outputs from the project include:
He spent 2011–12 on secondment to the Royal Society as a Senior Policy Adviser on the Science as an Open Enterprise report. The report examined the practicalities and ethics of opening up scientific data (including health data) to broader use, focusing in particular on promoting an intelligent openness rather than mere transparency. Since 2013 he has had a number of roles advising on access to confidential patient data. He was the ethicist for the General Practice Extraction Service’s Independent Advisory Group from 2013 until its closure in June 2015. He was an independent member of NHS Digital’s Data Access Advisory Group from 2015–17, and was appointed as the ethicist for its successor body, the Independent Group Advising on the Release of Data in 2017. He has been a member of the National Data Guardian’s Panel since 2016.
Wilson is also Associate Editor of Public Health Ethics, and a member of the Faculty of Public Health’s Public Health Ethics Committee.
You can find out more about James at his UCL page.
