As Distinguished Professor of Bioethics at Lancaster University, much of his work is about reproductive ethics and the regulation of reproductive technologies, especially the ethics of selective reproduction (practices that involve choosing between different possible future people). A book on this topic (Choosing Tomorrow’s Children, Oxford University Press) was published in 2010, supported by grants from the AHRC and Wellcome. Since then, particular interests have included ethical issues raised by uterus transplantation, non-invasive pre-natal testing, mitochondrial replacement, new sources of eggs and sperm, genome editing, surrogacy, and public funding for infertility treatment. Another abiding interest is the commercial exploitation of the human body, which was the subject of his first book, Bodies for Sale (Routledge, 2003).

From 2013 to 2021, Stephen was the joint leader of a large Wellcome-funded research programme about the Ethics and Regulation of Human Reproductive Donation. He is currently leading another large Wellcome project called The Future of Human Reproduction: transformative agendas and methods for the Humanities and Social Sciences, a collaboration with colleagues from Design, English Literature, Law, Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, & Sociology. He has previously held research grants from the AHRB, AHRC, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust.

In 2024, Stephen was appointed as a Council member on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. He is also a member of the Wellcome Trust Career Development Award Interview Panel, the AHRC Peer Review College, the UKRI Talent Peer Review College, and the editorial boards of Bioethics and Clinical Ethics.

Dr Kirsty Dunn is a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology at Lancaster University. She arrived at Lancaster in 2009 on a 1+ 3 ESRC studentship to investigate measures of infant understanding of the physical world principals surrounding objects, e.g. that they continue to exist when out of sight. Since then, Kirsty has been exploring the ways in which fetal and neonatal perceptual and cognitive development can be measured. For this, she uses ultrasound and fetal heart rate to measure responses to sounds and shapes of light in the womb. Kirsty is particularly interested in questioning what these measures can really tell us about psychological development in the early years. Further, she’s often focussed on finding new measures or new ways to use existing measures to answer, previously unanswerable, questions.

Sara Fovargue is a Professor of Law at the University of Sheffield, having previously been Professor of Law at Lancaster University. She has taught and researched issues relating to health law and ethics, and family law (particularly relating to children) throughout her career. She is particularly interested in matters relating to decision making for the ‘vulnerable’; risk and regulation; clinical research involving human and non-human animals; developing and emerging biotechnologies (such as xenotransplantation); reproduction and reproductive technologies; organ donation and transplantation; and conscientious objection. With regards to family law, her interests relate to parents, parenthood and reproductive technologies; children and health; children and childhood. She has published in leading legal and bioethical journals including the Law Quarterly Review, Legal Studies, Medical Law Review, Child and Family Law Quarterly, Journal of Medical Ethics, and the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. Her monograph, Xenotransplantation and Risk: Regulating a Developing Biotechnology, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, and her co-edited a collection, The Legitimacy of Medical Treatment: What Role for the Medical Exception?, was published by Routledge in 2015. A co-edited collection, Leading Works on Health Law and Ethics, will be published by Routledge in 2023. Her research has been funded by Wellcome, the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the AHRC. She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, joint Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Law Review, and a Fellow of the RSA.

Professor Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism and current Head of the English Literature and Creative Writing department at Lancaster University. She has published The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein (2021), Creating Romanticism (2013), Romanticism: An Introduction (2010), and Shelley and Vitality (2005). She co-edited The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy for Oxford University Press (2020) and currently leads an AHRC-funded project to transcribe all of Davy’s notebooks.

Elena Semino is Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. She holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Fuzhou in China. She specializes in health communication, medical humanities, corpus linguistics, stylistics, and metaphor theory and analysis. She has (co-)authored over 110 academic publications, including: Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study (Routledge, 2018). Her research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Newton Fund and the British Academy. In the periods 2011-14 and 2015-18, she was Head of Lancaster University’s Department of Linguistics and English Language, which is consistently ranked in the top 15 Linguistics Department in the world. She is a Fellow of the RSA and of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences

Emmanuel Tsekleves is a Full Professor (Chair) in Global Health Design Innovation and the Co-Director of the Future Cities Research Institute; a £3+ million interdisciplinary institute between Sunway University in Malaysia and Lancaster University, on research in Sustainable, Resilient, Liveable and Digital Cities. Driven by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, his research focuses on tackling community global (human and planetary) health challenges across the world, by working in the intersection of health, sustainability, design and technology. He has successfully attracted £7 million of research funding from several UK and European research bodies in the areas of health and sustainability, as a Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator and in projects worth £11 million as an Investigator. Emmanuel is also the founder and convenor of the first international Design Research Society Special Interest Group in Global Health Design research. He has published over 100 international research articles with most notable book publications in Design for Health, Design for Global Challenges and Design for People Living with Dementia, the first ones in the field, establishing new research agendas. Emmanuel’s research has attracted press/media attention with articles in the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Times, Discovery News Online, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Sky News, World Economic Forum, Medical News, The Conversation and several others, reaching over 30 million people.

Dr Nicola Williams is Wellcome Lecturer in The Ethics of Human Reproduction in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. Her research background is in the fields of Philosophy and Politics and her primary research interests concern questions of reproductive ethics, transplantation ethics, personal identity and intergenerational justice. Her most recent research has been funded by both Wellcome and the Leverhulme Trust. Between 2015 and 2019, she was a researcher on a Wellcome Senior Investigator award exploring various practices of reproductive donation from the perspectives of both ethics and law. Between 2019 and 2022 she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship focussing on the philosophical and policy questions raised by novel forms of organ and tissue transplantation such as hand, face and uterus transplantation and since April 2022 she has been a lecturer on the Wellcome-funded Research Development Award: The Future of Human Reproduction. She has (co)-authored numerous publications exploring different topics in reproductive and transplantation ethics, ranging from the practical (e.g. questions of funding for reproductive tissue transplants, and policy exclusions for novel forms of tissue transplantation under opt-out organ donation policy) to the conceptual (e.g. work focussed on how we might understand worries regarding harm to future persons, and the moral principles which underlie the practice of living organ donation). She is also currently co-editing a book which brings together international legal and ethical perspectives on uterine transplantation. Nicola is currently senior deputy of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology Ethics and Law special interest group and she has a keen interest in public engagement and research dissemination activities related to her research.

Dr Andrew Darby is a Research Associate in Speculative Design on The Future of Human Reproduction project. He is interested in the ways in which alternative design practices like Speculative Design can be used to understand and debate the paths by which disruptive technologies may develop. His PhD thesis explored participatory approaches to design fiction and offered a theoretical framework and practical guidance to support design facilitators in their work with participant groups. As well as developing design fiction research in the UK, Andy has worked on several international research projects in health and speculative design contexts in Canada, Malaysia and Ghana.

Georgia Walton specialises in US American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. She is currently working on a monograph that looks at the legacies of the American renaissance in contemporary literature and has published articles on texts by writers Maggie Nelson, Marilynne Robinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Other research interests include the representation of fairgrounds and amusement parks, spatial theories and the relationship between literature and other technologies of representation such as photography and cinema.

Dr Alexandra Krendel is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Southampton. She uses a variety of linguistic methods (such as corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis) to analyse different types of online communication, including online discussions on the topic of ectogenesis. Prior to taking up her role at the University of Southampton, Alexandra was a Senior Research Associate in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences at Lancaster University. Alexandra’s PhD work explored the language of the so-called “manosphere” (a loose network of online anti-feminist sites including pick-up artists and involuntary celibates) and the extent to which such language can be considered hate speech. Her other research interests include analysing the language of pro-feminist men online, and women who align themselves with a “traditionally feminine” gender role online.

Dr Laura O’Donovan is an academic lawyer who researches issues in healthcare law and bioethics. She is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Sheffield and was previously a Research Associate on the Wellcome-funded project, The Future of Human Reproduction. She has a particular interest in the following areas: (i) reproduction and the body (novel assisted reproductive technologies, pregnancy, and regulation of the family); (ii) organ donation (systems of opt-out donation and organ and tissue exclusions); and (iii) health inequalities with a particular focus on the gender health gap.

Laura’s PhD explored the legal and ethical challenges posed by uterus transplantation focusing on questions of risk in experimental medical procedures, reproductive autonomy, child welfare, and access to treatment. While undertaking her doctoral research, she also completed a placement at the Cabinet Office (CO) where she worked as a Policy Advisor in the Open Innovation Team. During this time, she worked on projects for BEIS (as it then was), MoJ and CO seeking to draw on academic research and expertise to generate analysis and ideas for policy.

In addition to her published academic research, Laura also has experience collaborating with external stakeholders to produce outputs. She is currently working with clinicians to develop public materials on the ethics of uterus transplantation and, with other members of The Future of Human Reproduction team, is collaborating on a policy briefing document with the Nuffield Council on Bioethics which explores the ethical and policy questions raised by in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). She has also submitted evidence to a number of consultations held by the UK, Scottish and Northern Irish governments on opt-out organ donation.

Katherine Young is The Future of Human Reproduction Project Coordinator.   She has worked in different departments across the University both student-facing and for external stakeholders.   Most recently, she has supported the ESRC Festival of Social Science at Lancaster, and the Morecambe Bay Curriculum team linked to the Eden North Project.

She is on secondment from her permanent role in the Politics, Philosophy and Religion (PPR) Department, where she is responsible for the course administration for the first year undergraduate students.

Zindzi works three days a week as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Future of Human Reproduction (FoHR) project, where she leads engagement and awareness-raising efforts to support the team’s work on the complex cultural, ethical, legal, and social issues raised by advances in biotechnology. Her work helps the team expand their impact, influence policy, and demonstrate best practice in this field.

In addition to her role at Lancaster, Zindzi is a business development consultant specialising in scenario planning. She also supervises at the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School and mentors on Public.io innovation programmes.

Previously, Zindzi was the lead facilitator for the Oxford Scenarios Programme and worked as a Business Engagement and Partnerships Manager at the University of Oxford, focusing on the humanities and social sciences. With over fifteen years of experience working and volunteering in the third sector, including roles with Oxfam GB, The Survivors Trust, and Oxfordshire Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre, Zindzi is passionate about advocating for the rights of women and girls. She values a team-centred, inclusive approach to her work, removing barriers to facilitate the growth of initiatives and partnerships.