PhD candidate Sasha Henriques’s research empowers discovery scientists working in genetics and biodata to navigate and consider ethical and societal concerns raised by their research by understanding what shapes their awareness of, and the ability to act on, the ethical issues associated with lack of diversity in genomics. It also explores the publics’ perspectives on the ethical issues associated with genetics.
Sasha has completed the longitudinal interviews with senior scientists from the Sanger Institute to explore how and why genomic researchers conceptualise race, ethnicity and ancestry information. She has also completed the ethnographic observations of scientists at work in their professional environment to explore the genomic research ecosystem and the embodiment of social justice within genomic research. She has also collected archived material from the Human Genome Project and also interviewed scientists who were directly involved in this to
explore how ethnicity was considered historically within the creation of the HGP.
In addition to interviewing discovery scientists, Sasha has also conducted ethnographic research and interviews at public exhibitions on race and racism in genetics at the Black Cultural Archives and the Wellcome Collection in London. She has also contributed directly to these exhibitions, working directly with artists Kofi (Larry) Achiampong and David Blandy who created a film on eugenics which involved the classification of humans in genetics. Sasha is currently analysing the autoethnographic part of her project and writing up her thesis ready for submission in 2025.