Heidi C. Howard

Biography

Heidi Carmen Howard received her undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Biology from McGill University (Montréal, Canada). The focus of her PhD was neurogenetics and it culminated in the cloning of the gene for Andermann Syndrome (ACCPN), a rare neuropathy primarily present in the founder population of Québec. She continued her genetics training in psychiatric genetics at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona (Spain) and at the Douglas Hospital in Montréal (Canada). With an Erasmus Mundus fellowship, she completed the Erasmus Mundus Master of Bioethics programme in 2008 and since then, with the support of the European Commission FP7 Marie Curie Career Development Awards (2009-2011; 2011-2013) she has been working on the ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) related to genetics and genomics as well as biobanking at KULeuven (Belgium) and inserm (France). In the autumn of 2013 she spent a semester as assistant professor at the Radboud University Medical Centre (Netherlands). Her main areas of research are the ethical, legal and social aspects of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, public health genomics, genomic medicine, new genomic technologies, participant-centric research initiatives and the translation of genomics from the laboratory to the clinic. Heidi Carmen Howard is also an invited scholar at the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University (Montréal, Canada) and a member of the Public and Professional Policy Committee of the European Society of Human Genetics.

Research Interest

Neurogenetics