Director, Bioethics
Dorothée Caminiti is director of the Bioethics program with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University where she leads the Health Care Ethics Internship program. She works at the intersection of digital ethics in health care and law and focuses on the ethical problems associated with personalized medicine and the processing of health-related data.
Caminiti began her career in Europe, where she was a litigation attorney with leading global law firms for more than a decade. She then applied her legal expertise to the field of bioethics, serving in leadership roles with various firms in Switzerland. Most recently, she was a Research Fellow in global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School.
While working at ETH Zurich, she served in the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implication (ELSI) Advisory Group of the Swiss Personalized Health Network. Here, Caminiti helped develop major improvements to the way research is conducted through the publication of (1) the “Ethical Framework for Responsible Data Processing in Personalized Health Research” and (2) recommendations on “Reporting actionable genetic findings to research participants.” Furthermore, she led the development of a harmonized “Data Transfer and Use Agreement Template” in collaboration with 15 Swiss institutions. This first-ever national template in the Swiss research context was adopted by the five university hospitals across Switzerland.
As a legal and ethics officer at Swiss Biobanking Platform, she created a nationwide Material Transfer Agreement template for the use of human biological samples and related data.
Caminiti received master’s degrees in law from Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), a LL.M from University of Leicester (UK) and University of Liege (Belgium), as well as a master’s degree in bioethics from Harvard University. She is a Certified Information Privacy Professional in Europe (IAPP CIPP/E).