Eleonore Pauwels is an international science policy expert, who specializes in the governance of emerging technologies, including genomics, digital and bio-engineering, participatory health design, and citizen science.  At the Wilson Center, she is the Director of Biology Collectives, and Senior Program Associate within the Science and Technology Innovation Program. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Eleonore directs the Citizen Health Innovators Project. In this context, her research focuses on developing regulatory and governance mechanisms for the fast-growing ecosystem of health innovators, built around maker spaces and community bio labs, to support responsible innovation in distributed networks. This is part of her larger effort to design actionable ethics and governance strategies to enable responsible and fair citizen participation in new health and genomics technologies. She is particularly interested in the perils and promises of personal genomics, and how to harness this trove of data and techniques to truly, ethically empower citizens in different societal contexts and cultures.

With the Commons Lab at the Wilson Center, Eleonore contributes to building citizen science capacity to help public health actors globally prepare for and respond to mosquito borne diseases.

As a science policy expert with professional experience both in the U.S. and Europe, Eleonore has been awarded several grants by U.S. and European institutions, including the U.S. National Science Foundation and the European Commission. She is co-PI of a 4 million Euro grant from to promote responsible research and innovation in genomics and synthetic biology.

Eleonore regularly testifies before U.S. and European authorities including the U.S. Department of State, NAS, NIH, NCI, FDA, the National Intelligence Council, the European Commission and the UN. But she is also well-versed in communicating complex and novel scientific developments for lay audiences and her writing has been featured in media outlets such as Nature, The New York Times, The Guardian, Scientific American, Le Monde, Slate and The Miami Herald.

Outside of the Wilson Center, Eleonore is an aspiring social entrepreneur interested in democratizing science and technology, in particular bio-innovation, for underserved populations in the USA and globally. Bilingual in French and English, her blog can be found here and she tweets @EleonorPauwels.

Expertise

Science, Technology and Innovation Policy; Citizen Science; Innovation Ecosystems; Genomics, Precision Medicine, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology;  Society and Culture;  Governance;  Europe; European Union; United States