blue latex gloved hand in a lab sorting test tubes

The Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA) Human Genomics Research Hub

Principal Investigators: Mildred Cho, Stanford University, and Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Columbia University

Co-Investigator: Josephine Johnston, The Hastings Center

Funder: National Human Genome Research Institute

Start date: October 2024

The Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Columbia Division of Ethics will lead a five-year expansion of their hub for research on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of human genomics, in collaboration with The Hastings Center and Case Western Reserve University, along with multiple partner organizations. The hub—the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA)–is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute.

A centerpiece of the project is the ELSIhub.org online knowledge portal, which facilitates the use of ELSI research findings. The site will be outfitted with new tools to enable global, online discussions between scholars in ethics, social science, public health, and law and other stakeholders, during this phase of the project. The team will also be testing the responsible use of large language models for research synthesis that will aid human curators in the production of summarized ELSI research for a wide variety of audiences and use cases.

In its next phase, CERA will develop programming to engage diverse communities to integrate ELSI with genome research. This includes facilitating networking to help build research teams that include legal, social science, humanistic, and community perspectives at all phases of the translational pipeline. Their efforts will focus in particular on the inclusion of communities underserved by and underrepresented in genome research and genome scientists themselves.