Professor Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBe, is health law and bioethics faculty at the University of Michigan Medical School and an Associate Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology. She is the first to make tenure at the U-M medical school with JD as their terminal degree. She is also the interim co-director of the U-M Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, 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 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 and a member of the National Academies’ committee on Newborn Screening: Current Landscape and Future Directions. In the past, she was also 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 an Associate Director for President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

The overarching goal of Prof. Spector’s work is improving the governance of secondary research with health data and specimens to increase the accessibility of data and generalizability of advances across diverse communities. To that end, she was the PI of a NHGRI K01 focusing on academic/private relationships in genetic research and is the PI of an NCTAS R01 on hospitals sharing patient data with commercial entities. She has been PI or Co-I on ~$200M in funding.

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.

Professor Spector received her JD and MBe from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and School of Medicine after graduating from Middlebury College. She completed a research fellowship in bioethics at Michigan Medicine and is a former practicing drug and device attorney for the biotech industry.

The substantive focus of my research is improving the governance of research with health data and specimens to increase both accessibility and generalizability across diverse communities. My methodological focus is “translational policy,” generating the empirical data necessary to develop and implement improved health policy.