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Karen S. Rommelfanger is an Associate Professor in both the Department of Neurology and the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Emory University, and the founder of Institute of Neuroethics as well as the Ningen Neuroethics Co-Lab.[1] She provides consulting services on an international scale and has expertise on movement disorders and the placebo effect. She primarily works on the issue of neuroethics, connecting stakeholders across large-scale organizations to integrate ethical thought with innovation in neurotechnology. [2]
Rommelfanger studied at Angelo State University on a full academic ride from the Carr Scholarship. In 1999, she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in chemistry. She participated in a P.E.T. Pharmacology Internship at the University of Michigan Nuclear Medicine Division in 1998. She earned her M.S. in Neurotoxicology in 2002 from the College of Pharmacy at the University of Texas, Austin. In 2002, she received additional training in immunochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.
Rommelfanger pursued her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Emory University in the School of Medicine and Department of Human Genetics, completing it in 2007. Additionally, she trained in rodent surgery at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Between 2008 and 2013, she completed a series of fellowships, including:
The Electron Microscopy Fellowship at the Emory University School of Medicine, Department of Neurology (2008-2009)
The Neurobiology Fellowship at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Neurobiology Unit (2008-2009)The Electrophysiology Fellowship at Emory University, Yerkes National Primate Research Center (2009-2011)
Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University, Scholars Program for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research under the School of Medicine and Department of Neurology (2011 - 2013)
Currently, Rommelfanger is a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Emory University Center for Ethics. She also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the Neuroscience Graduate Program in the Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and for Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at the College of Arts and Sciences. She is also on the affiliate faculty at the Georgia Tech Engineering Center, working on neuroethics. Outside of academia, she is the founder and director of the Institute of Neuroethics, a “think and do tank” that she started in 2021. She is also the founder and CEO of the Ningen Neuroethics Co-Lab, which she started in 2020.
Rommelfanger is known for starting the Neuroethics Program at Emory University, which she directed until 2021. She also directed the Jones Program in Ethics at the Laney Graduate School, as well as the Responsible Conduct of Research Training at the Emory University Medical School’s Office of Postdoctoral Education. She founded and directed the Functional Neurological Disorders Pilot Clinic from 2017-2018, which is still ongoing.
Rommelfanger has held multiple previous faculty positions including Associate Professor of Neurology in the Division of Movement Disorders at the Emory University School of Medicine, Assistant Professor of Neurology in the Division of Movement Disorders, and Senior Associate in the Department of Neurology.
Rommelfanger has published extensively on neuroethics. She co-wrote “Neuroethics guidance documents: principles, analysis, and implementation strategies,”, analyzing existing neuroethics principles and what their implications would be for different people in the field going forward.[3] She also hones in on global cooperation with articles like “Neuroethics: Think Global,” where she explores the rise of philosophical considerations coupled with the growing field of neurotechnology, and what those would look like in various scientific cultures.[4]
In past writing, Rommelfanger has advocated for the use of placebo therapies. Her Huffpost opinion piece “Take Two Placebo Pills and Call Me in the Morning” discusses the proven effectiveness of placebo treatments, and how they could be implemented ethically on a systematic level, from serious illnesses to everyday pain.[10] Specifically for movement disorders, Rommelfanger wrote in “Opinion: A role for placebo therapy in psychogenic movement disorders,” an area where traditional treatments have had minimal success.[11]
In addition to writing, Rommelfanger acts as a peer reviewer on many manuscripts for large-scale academic journals such as the AMA Journal of Ethics and the European Journal of Neurology. [1]She also co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics, published in 2020. [13]From 2018-2021, she was the Senior Associate Editor for the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience, where she reviewed many published works related to the ethical and societal implications of brain science. [1]
Rommelfanger has been a part of various organizations throughout her career, holding leadership positions in many of them. She currently offers consulting services for many organizations, working on ethical problems of large-scale grants at the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Workgroup, and serving on the Neuroethics Advisory Board at BrainMind. Her work reaches the global scale, as she serves on the committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine where works on the “Engaging Scientists in Shared Responsible Innovation in Neuroscience in Southeast Asia” workshop series, as well as the committee for the Neuroscience-Inspired Policy Initiative at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Rommelfanger also works on security issues for the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), and is a current member of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where she works on more specific regional issues.
Previously, Rommelfanger founded NeuroEthics Women Leaders (NEW), and directed it until 2021. For the International Neuroethics Society, she has served as a co-chair of multiple committees and also as an Executive Board Member. For the NIH, she worked as an Ambassador at the Neuroethics Working group to facilitate and connect different parts of the EU’s brain research projects. Similarly she led the Global Neuroethics Working Group’s International Brain Initiative, where she instituted neuroethics into large-scale brain projects around the world. Her experience has extended to educational initiatives as well, such as the Neuroethics Education Curriculum Committee at the International Brain Research Organization.
Rommelfanger has helped organize several national and international conferences such as the BRAIN Initiative Investigators Meeting, and regional events like "Zombies and Zombethics! Walking with the Dead. An Ethics Symposium for the Living." She served as a co-chair for the "Neuromatch 3.0 Democratic Neuroscience Unconference", and for "Biotechnology and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit", where she led an international committee to create a document of aspirational guidelines for ethical cellular technology. She commonly features as a panelist or guest speaker at conferences such as the AI for Good Summit[14] and the BrainMind Neuromodulation, BCI, and AI event.[15]
