Team Members

Barbara Prainsack

Barbara Prainsack is a professor and Head of Department at the Department of Political Science at the University Vienna, where she also directs the interdisciplinary Research Platform “Governance of Digital Practices”. Her work explores the social, ethical, and regulatory dimensions of genetic and data-driven practices and technologies in biomedicine and forensics. She holds honorary positions at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, at the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRE), University of Montreal, Canada, and at the Centre for Health, Law, and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) at the University of Oxford. Her latest books are: Personalized Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? (New York University Press, 2017), and The Pandemic Within: Policy Making for a Better World (with H. Wagenaar, Policy Press, 2021). Barbara is also involved in policy-related work, e.g. as a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Commission, and as Chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies. She is a member of the British Royal Academy of Arts, and an elected foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters as well as the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech).

Seliem El-Sayed

Seliem El-Sayed earned his Master’s degree in International Public Management and Political Science from Institut d’études politiques de Paris (SciencesPo) and Freie Universität Berlin (2020), partly funded by a scholarship of the Franco-German University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from University College Maastricht in Liberal Arts and Sciences (2017) with a concentration on International Relations and Law. During his undergraduate studies, he spent a trimester at the University of California (Santa Cruz) doing coursework in Critical Legal Studies and Constitutional Law. For his graduate thesis he evaluated the German litigation framework’s ability to safeguard citizens from algorithmic discrimination.

In the course of his doctoral dissertation entitled “Reframing Digital Data Governance for Public Value”, Seliem discusses the shortcomings of dominant data governance frameworks and how these shortcomings can be addressed through a focus on public value and data solidarity.