From theory to practice: the 2022 UNESCO Brief on the right to science and COVID-19

About the Speakers

Yusuke Mori is Director General for Policy Innovation Department at the City of Tsukuba, the biggest science city of Japan. He is in charge of comprehensive management strategy planning, science and technology promotion, digitisation of the city government, smart city development, and promotion of SDGs.

He is also Visiting Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems at the University of Tsukuba.

Christine Mitchell is Executive Director of the Centre for Bioethics and Lecturer, Dept. of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

Christine Mitchell founded the clinical ethics program at Boston Children’s Hospital, directing the ethics consultation service and leading the Ethics Advisory Committee for over 30 years. At Harvard Medical School, where she is Executive Director of the Centre for Bioethics, which she helped to launch in 2014, Mitchell developed the Capstone program for Master of Bioethics students, Consortia on Clinical Ethics and Research Ethics, and the Leadership Group of ethics committees at 16 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals.

Abdul Kadir H. Mohammed recently retired from Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden, where he was Professor of Biological Psychology. He has published more than 100 scientific publications and did seminal work on the impact of environmental enrichment on brain and behaviour at adulthood and during aging.

He leads the SAGE (Successful AGing and Enrichment) project which involves collaboration between Linnaeus University, Karolinska Institute, Harvard Medical School and Medical University of South Carolina. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and has served for 6 years as Chair of African Regional Committee of the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO).

Helle Porsdam is Professor of Law and Humanities at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law (CIS), Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. She teaches American Culture and History in the SAXO Department, Faculty of the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, and Law and Humanities, the Culture and History of Human Rights and Cultural Rights at the Faculty of Law. She also holds a UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights.

Sebastian Porsdam Mann is a researcher and DPhil student at the Faculty of Law at Oxford. Following undergraduate (philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience) and graduate (PhD, neuroethics) studies at Cambridge, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics and, supported by a Carlsberg Foundation grant, the Uehiro Center for Ethics at Oxford as well as Copenhagen University. In addition to the human right to science, Sebastian’s research interest span across blockchain and data ethics, cognitive enhancement, the ethics of modifying lifeforms, and ethical aspects of clinical proteomics.