Research Ethics and Oversight

I began working on issues related to research ethics and oversight while working as a Research Assistant in the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University and continued to do so while a post doc at the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford. Collaborative papers I have written on this topic include an evaluation of the Belmont Report in relation to the state of research ethics today, an examination of issues faced by the many novel regulatory bodies (e.g., conflict of interest committees, data safety monitoring boards) that have been developed in in the realm of research oversight, and a discussion of how research ethics and oversight ought to proceed in response to developing neurotechnologies.

Currently, I am leading a SSHRC-funded project on the topic of community involvement in research ethics oversight. This project aims to examine the demands, justifications, and strategies of various communities who seek to have a greater voice in governing the research that impacts them. I am also interested in how new forms of research, particularly those utilizing machine learning and especially in the domain of psychiatry, challenge our current systems of research ethics oversight. I am also part of an international working group seeking to examine justifications underlying participatory research and oversight. 

Representative Papers: ​

• Friesen, P., Yusof, A., Sheehan, M. (2019) Should the Decisions of Institutional Review Boards be Consistent? Ethics and Human Research.

• Friesen, P., Kearns, L., Redman, B., & Caplan, A. L. (2017). Rethinking the Belmont Report? The American Journal of Bioethics.

• Friesen, P., & O’Leary, K. (2019). Machine learning and suicide prevention: considering context as a guide to ethical design, Mental Health as Public Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Ethics of Prevention, Eds. Cratsley, K., and Radden, J., Elsevier.

Recent/ Forthcoming Papers: ​

• Friesen, P., Douglas-Jones, R., Marks, M., Pierce R., Fletcher, K., Mishra, A., Lorimer, J., Veliz, C., Hallowell, N., Graham, M., Chan, M.S. Davies, H., Sallamuddin, T. (2020) Governing AI-Driven Health Research: Are IRBs up to the Task? Ethics and Human Research 

• Skorburg, J. A., Friesen, P. (2020) Ethical Issues in Text Mining for Mental Health. The Atlas of Language Analysis in Psychology. Eds. Dehghani, M. & Boyd, R.

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Recent/ Upcoming Talks:

• “Community Involvement in Research Ethics Oversight: Justifications, Boundaries, and Processes” (May 2021) at the Canadian Association of Research Ethics Boards (CAREB-ACCER) Annual Meeting

• “Don’t Worry: Facebook is Figuring it out for us” (April 2020) at Big Data Challenges for Ethics Review Committees, Health Ethics and Policy Lab, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (by Zoom)