Dr Beverley Alice Townsend is a member of the WHO working group for the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in Health. She is currently doing her third Masters's Degree in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.
In her PhD, she considered the interplay of the right to privacy and data protection in digital health in Africa. Her interest and expertise is in digital ethics, governance, and regulation in an electronic environment in the financial, technology, and healthcare sectors within developing economies and internationally. Specifically, she looked at the ethical tension created by data, especially Big Data and medical data, and the influence human rights, particularly the rights to privacy and data protection, have within a digital, electronic environment - that is - the highly contextual and nuanced nature of privacy and data protection in a networked world. Within this context, she considered the regulation and ethical impact of such rights and how the right of privacy, freedom of expression, and security rights contribute and conflict in a new digital era and the manner in which such rights may be reconciled in a helpful way.
She has expertise in eHealth (electronic health), Artificial Intelligence, privacy rights, data protection, and informational privacy, new data protection regulation (POPIA) in South Africa, informed consent, Big Data, and biobanking, and regulatory and policy reform in South Africa. She has conducted extensive research into inter alia the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation, the African Union Data Protection Malabo Convention, U.S. HIPAA, and various national privacy and data protection legislation (including the South African POPI Act). Her PhD makes specific reference to the failings within the Malabo Convention and recommends amendments so that Africa conforms to baseline international standards whilst maintaining cultural, and contextual sensitivity to the nature of digital, data realities in the Global South.
Dr Townsend joined the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Health Law and Bioethics flagship as a post-doctoral research fellow in April 2019 (working from Cape Town). She examines and analyses the legal, regulatory, and ethical constraints and implications of the application of precision genomic medicine in South Africa. This research seeks to further the nanotechnology and biotechnological discourse by providing value and insight in addressing the legal, ethical, and societal issues that lie at the intersection of genomic editing technologies, precision medicine, public health, deliberative public engagement, and policy formation.
Her focus has been on the intersection of law, science and ethics; data protection; Big Bata; AI; the man-machine interface; medical negligence and malpractice law; data sharing and data transfer across jurisdictions; research ethics and bioethics; informed consent; biobanking; patents and benefit-sharing; and the integration thereof within broader ethical imperatives and socio-economic considerations in South Africa. With the objective of finding robust regulatory solutions that are culturally and contextually sensitive, robust, inclusive, appropriate, and Afro-centric. Central to this discussion is the establishing of how public opinion obtained through a process of deliberative public collaboration and engagement can be used as a mechanism to direct and inform the regulation of ‘disruptive’ technologies, and to develop a normative framework that supports this.
