Principal Investigator
Professor Muireann Quigley
Professor Quigley has an interdisciplinary background which crosses medicine, ethics, and law. Her current research focuses on the legal and philosophical challenges arising from the joining of persons and bodies with attached and implanted medical devices. These are being investigated as part of the Everyday Cyborgs 2.0 project.
Professor Quigley is the author of a recent major monograph examining how the law ought to deal with novel challenges regarding the use and control of human biomaterials. Self-ownership, Property Rights, & the Human Body: A Legal and Philosophical Analysis was originally published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Drawing together often disparate strands of property discourse, it offers an original interdisciplinary defence of the position that persons ought to be seen as the prima facie holders of property rights in their separated biomaterials.
Research Fellows
Dr Laura Downey
Laura’s work focuses on understanding the interaction between law and regulation, and the broader sociotechnical environment. In particular, she is interested in developing an understanding of how law and specific legal concepts develop in this environment with a view to aiding practical questions as to how law and regulation can effectively intervene in innovation, and normative questions as to how law and technology should be guided. She also draws on the concept of identity in law in relation to health research and biotechnological advances. Her broader interests include the regulation of technology in general and medical law. Her current work on the Everyday Cyborgs 2.0 project has focused on the regulation of medical devices, looking in particular at the evolving landscape in the UK and issues concerning software as a medical device.
Dr Louise Hatherall
Dr Louise Hatherall is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham Law School having previously held roles at the University of Edinburgh and University of Bristol. She is broadly interested in how socio-legal empirical research can explore the intersections between health technologies, law, regulation (particularly IP), and the public. She works on a number of projects, including the Wellcome funded ‘Everyday Cyborgs 2.0‘ project with Professor Muireann Quigley where she analyses the legal and social challenges of software as a medical device and the imagined regulatory futures of people with attached and implanted medical devices. She is a collaborator on the ‘Coproducing a Diabetes Data Rights Charter‘ (funded by BIIF, AHRC, and the Nightscout Foundation) which collaboratively develops a rights Charter with people with diabetes to enable them to, safely and securely, exercise control over their diabetes data in a manner which better meets their needs. She is also a collaborator on the IAS funded ‘Psychedelics and Regulatory Decision-Making project’ which maps the legal and regulatory landscape as it pertains to psychedelics as medicine. She is an alumni affiliate of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, University of Edinburgh.