Faculty in Focus: Shawneequa Callier

September 2, 2025

Authored by:

Ruth Steinhardt, Long Nguyen

When Shawneequa Callierwas an undergraduate, a sheep changed her life.

It was the late 1990s, and Dollyhad recently become the first cloned mammal created from an adult cell. The breakthrough sparked an explosion of debate around the ethics and possibilities of cloning, and Callier remembers attending a talk given by Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who led the research team that created Dolly. Callier, behind rows of fellow students in the auditorium's balcony, listened in fascination.

Having taken a class on the myths and realities of human cloning, Callier knew better than to heed the alarmist fantasies that Dolly triggered in some at the time. Sci-fi-style vats of cloned human beings were not in the offing. But she knew, too, that she was seeing history in the making. A fascinating new domain of biomedical research, with new possibilities, new consequences and new questions, was coming into being before her eyes.

Callier had considered going to law school, and eventually would do so. But she would do it with ambitions that went beyond legal practice.

"I knew I wanted to continue exploring questions around breakthrough technologies like that, where there are so many social, cultural and religious questions and viewpoints," Callier said.

Now, Callier explores these questions as an associate professor of clinical research and leadership at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She uses her legal training as an expert in the ethical, legal and social implications (a field also called ELSI) of genomics and data science research, focusing on the intersection of bioethics, law and technology. Her teaching history includes a University Seminar with Sonia Suter, who holds two endowed research professorships and is co-founder and founding director of the Health Law and Policy Program at GW Law School. Currently, Callier works with graduate health science students to explore the thorny ethical issues they may encounter in translational health research.

"What excites me the most is preparing the next generation of scientists and healthcare professionals to anticipate future ethical challenges," Callier said.

That may mean thinking through how a research team is composed-scientists, subjects, and sometimes collaborators from government or industry-and being able to recognize and ethically balance the interests of the parties involved. It may also mean seeing how research's effects may ripple beyond the primary focus of study.

What would it mean for genes to be judged?

Take Callier's work as a co-investigator on a project examining the legal implications of polygenic scoring, a method by which a person's or community's genetic phenotype is analyzed to assess their risk of various conditions including cancer and heart disease. Callier is part of a team focusing on aspects of polygenic scoring that they call "beyond the medical," though these may have medical aspects-conditions like criminality and educational attainment. Some even posit that polygenic scores could be created for political affiliation.

That's a tempting knowledge proposition for many, Callier said, especially as more and more people turn to personal genetic analysis for, essentially, entertainment: Sending a swab to a DNA testing company may be a way to assess your likelihood of health risks, but users also do it to provide insight into family legends or find surprises in their family tree. As that information is used to analyze large populations, it's also a field ripe for possible misuse.

Using polygenic scores to determine non-medical outcomes "can be very controversial, especially if we make the mistake of attributing genetics to particular groups based on how we socially construct those groups," Callier said. So she and her team have been "scanning the horizon," exploring how ethical and legal pitfalls could arise and how to avoid them in advance

"How would you regulate something that is considered an entertaining [activity], but not necessarily a medical one, especially in cases when there could be great harm to an individual or a community if you start defining the trait a certain way?" Callier asks. "We're creating case studies to help scientists and legal scholars better consider the potential ethical and legal implications."

"What do we need to do beyond the law?"

In the United States, a federal "Common Rule"for the protection of human subjects guides researchers' interactions with the individuals who have opted in to a given study. There are a set of standards for informed consent: Research participants know that they are participating in research and are ensured awareness of their rights and, where applicable, of the risks they may face.

But there is often no set of agreed-upon standards for how researchers should consider the potential reverberations of their work beyond these individual participants-how a person's participation might affect their family, community or other networks.

With students, Callier sometimes uses the example of members of the Havasupai, an Indigenous nation in Arizona, who approached researchers with a desire to understand the genetic causes of diabetes in their community. In the 1990s, the researchers engaged with the community to undertake this study, which included obtaining "broad consent," the right to use collected materials for unspecified future research, from participants.

That broad consent, however, may not have fully communicated how these or other researchers might use the DNA they collected-specifically in blood, which for the Havasupai has a powerful spiritual meaning. Eventually, a member of the tribe who had agreed to participate years before attended a lecture by a graduate student using data from that long-ago study. She was surprised by its scope, which went well beyond the diabetes research she remembered having been told about. Eventually, tribal members would find that researchers had drawn on their genetic data for papers that promulgated unexpected narratives about the Havasupai and undermined tribal beliefs about their own cultural and geographic origins. The tribe sued the university, which settled, agreeing to compensate participants and to return their blood samples.

But a settlement is not legal precedent, Callier pointed out. Nor does it indicate moral consensus. The geneticist who led the Havasupai project defended the research as "good science"as recently as 2010. In genetic research, after all, lifesaving progress can often be made by investigating patterns that lead beyond the original question.

A guiding principle, then, might be "bidirectional learning" between researcher and community, Callier explained. "As you engage with research participants about the nature of the science and what it really means, the community can share with you what might be [their] priorities or agenda related to that science. They should be teaching you, too."

While Callier does provide her students with an overview of the rich ground of bioethics through case studies-"I love knowing the foundation"- she hopes to help them move beyond understanding the field as it currently exists. The goal is to "provide them with a framework of how to ask good questions" when they are faced with unforeseeable problems arising from technologies that either don't yet exist or are currently only in infancy. By learning to ask these questions, students can help build a research ecosystem that anticipates harm instead of reacting after its infliction.

"A big part of why I do what I do is because I want to maximize the benefit of new technologies for all people," Callier said. "The law can take us pretty far in understanding the limits and what we definitely should not do, and hopefully also builds in some accountability measures. But I also want to think, 'Okay, what do we need to do beyond the law in the middle of this completely new era of research, or this new technology we're building where some of the questions that could come up have never come up before?'"

Genomics as a guide to AI ELSI

Artificial intelligence is an immediate example of that kind of evolving field. "AI is literally everywhere right now," Callier said-in teaching and learning, in the law, in healthcare and in scientific analysis. And it is itself a science under study. As societies grapple with establishing an ethical scaffolding for AI implementation, Callier said, thinkers and policymakers should take advantage of the resources offered by genomics' legacy of ELSI research.

"At the start of the Human Genome Project, so ever since the 1990s, we've had investigators funded to consider the ethical, legal and social implications of genomics," she said. Conversely, while principles, values and governance structures around AI have been widely discussed in the past few years, "the field does not have the benefit of decades and decades of empirical interdisciplinary research."

But it's not just a case of the established science informing the new. Here, too, Callier believes bidirectional learning should apply. "I think as we try to solve the problems in AI, the fields should speak to each other. Genome scientists can learn a lot about the trade-offs AI researchers are making and how they have been highlighting the need for fairness and justice. Genomics has been going on for many, many years and the data sets we use are still limited in terms of the populations around the world that need to be included."

At home in GW and D.C.

The progress powered by cross-disciplinary conversation is a major reason Callier loves working at GW, she said. "To have the opportunity to benefit from not only the diverse disciplines, but the brilliant professors who are here at GW, who are doing groundbreaking work and are also open to breaking the silos and working together to help solve some of these big problems-it makes me feel as if anything is possible here," she said.

Community has long been important to Callier, who grew up in Queens, New York-"the most diverse suburb in the world"-and moved to Washington, D.C., for law school. She's now been in the District for almost 20 years and considers it a second home.

"D.C. history runs really deep," she said. "It's not just a city of politicians, it's a city of many different, amazing, diverse people…I feel very invested in what happens to D.C. and the people here."

Part of that investment is Callier's position as chair of the board of the Ben's Chili Bowl Foundation, the community-service arm of one of D.C.'s oldest Black-owned restaurants. A mainstay of D.C.'s historic "Black Broadway"on U Street, Ben's storied history includes being the only restaurant open to provide meals and shelter during the 1968 riots. Through the foundation, Callier and her colleagues empower local community organizations in health care, job training, the arts and beyond.

She also has served for more than a decade as a special volunteer with the National Institutes of Health, where she is the only person with a legal and bioethical background in a global laboratory of geneticists. "I've been working side by side with this group of geneticists for 13 years, assessing and analyzing the ethical and legal implications of our work and engaging in ethics research projects," she said.

Callier's daily life involves engaging with thorny intellectual and moral problems at a high, sometimes speculative level. But in her off hours, she gets down to earth-literally. "If I spend a week working on a grant proposal, it's almost guaranteed that I'll spend that Saturday in the garden the entire day."

She's also a hiker and a runner, taking on her first half marathon last year and currently weighing the possibility of training for a full one. "I spend as much time outdoors as I possibly can."

Through the study of bioethics, Callier's students establish structures of thought that they'll be able to rely on even amid the most intractable ethical problems.

"I think everyone should take a bioethics class, no matter what field they're in," she said.