Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBE

Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBe, studies how the law and institutional practices impact the ethics of the research use of health data. Her work follows data from clinical care into research, across academic and commercial settings, and into emerging technologies. As health data become central to medical discovery, questions of access, control, and accountability grow more urgent. Her work asks how we can advance scientific discovery with health data while honoring the people and communities who provide it.

At the University of Michigan, Prof. Spector studies how genetic researchers choose and access genomic databases, how patients view research and commercial uses of data and specimens, and how academia and industry govern data-sharing partnerships. Her research demonstrates procedural factors, like speed and ease of access, shape which datasets researchers use - and whose data inform discovery. 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 is the inaugural George E. Wantz Professor of Bioethics and a tenured Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the U-M Medical School. She directs Michigan Bioethics, which received the 2022 American Society of Bioethics & Humanities Cornerstone Award; chairs the Medical School’s Research Ethics Committee; and serves as the ethicist on Michigan Medicine’s Human Data and Biospecimen Release Committee. She was the first faculty member to earn tenure at the U-M Medical School with a JD as a terminal degree.

Her national service includes serving as Associate Director of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues; chairing the American Heart Association’s Data Sharing, Privacy, and Security Committee; and serving on the National Academies committee on newborn screening. She is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Bioethics, a current Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar, and a Fellow of the Hastings Center. A former drug and device attorney, she earned her JD and master’s in bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and her BA at Middlebury College.