Dr Faranak Hardcastle
Research Fellow
Faranak Hardcastle is a Research Fellow in the Clinical Ethics and Law (CELS) research group within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton.
I am a sociotechnical researcher exploring the ethics and societal impact of the application of Machine Learning/AI in Genomics Medicine. I contribute to two Welcome Trust research projects on Ethical Preparedness in Genomic Medicine (EPPiGEN) and UKBiobank. I also collaborate on other projects at CELS such as the EPPIGEN/PERU funded public engagement project that aims to explore what people think about their routine health data being accessed and used in different ways and what are their concerns and hopes about the future.
Before joining CELS, I was a Research Associate at the University of Bristol, collaborating on S3W, an interdisciplinary project that explores the opportunities and challenges of using Semantic Linked Data (SLD) for researching health inequalities. I contributed to ethnographic research on the processes of developing a SLD proof-of-concept demonstrator for researching health inequalities that used the data from English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and the Great British Class Survey (GBCS).
My background is in Web Science. My PhD thesis explored the sociotechnical processes involved in Online Behavioural Tracking and Advertising technologies and practices. As part of this, I conceptualised a model for communicating OBTA operational details. I then conducted key informant interviews to discuss the model with various OBTA actor groups such as researchers, companies, and governance bodies. The interviews enabled exploring the affordances of the model as well as a better understanding of the sociotechnical imaginaries that are shaping the future of the Web.