Kayte Spector-Bagdady

Professor Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBe, is the George E. Wantz Professor of Bioethics and an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan (U-M) Medical School. She is the first to make tenure at the U-M medical school with a JD as a terminal degree. She is also the Director of Michigan Bioethics, which won the 2022 American Society for Bioethics & Humanities’ (ASBH) Cornerstone Award. At U-M she is also the Chair of the Research Ethics Committee, the ethicist on the Michigan Medicine Human Data and Biospecimen Release Committee, and a HEC-certified clinical ethicist. She teaches the Responsible Conduct of Research as well as Research Ethics and the Law.

Prof. Spector is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Bioethics. In the past, she was also a member of the National Academies’ committee on newborn screening; Chair and lead author of the American Heart Association’s “Principles for Health Information Collecting, Sharing, and Use;” a member of the ASBH Board of Directors; and Associate Director for President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

The goal of Prof. Spector’s work is improving the governance of secondary research with health data and building machine learning/artificial intelligence systems to increase the accessibility of data and equitable access to research advances across diverse communities. Prof. Spector has been continuously NIH-grant funded (.75-.9 FTE) since her appointment and has been PI or Co-I on ~$200M in extramural funding. She was a 2019 American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics Health Law Scholar and is a current Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar and a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics.

Her recent articles have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Science, JAMA, Health Affairs, and Nature Medicine, and her research or expertise has appeared in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and CNN.

Prof. Spector received her JD and Masters of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from Middlebury College. She completed a research fellowship in bioethics at Michigan Medicine and is a former practicing drug and device attorney.