Dr Natalie Banner

Natalie is an Intellectual Forum Senior Research Associate.

Dr Natalie Banner works at the intersection of health, data, technology and trust. She is Director of Ethics at Genomics England.

Natalie is responsible for enabling Genomics England to navigate the complex ethical challenges in advancing genomic medicine and research, and ensuring the organisation is a good steward of research participants' data.

She formerly led Understanding Patient Data, an initiative hosted at the Wellcome Trust that aimed to make the way patient data is used more visible, understandable and trustworthy for patients, the public and health professionals. She specialised in translating insights from deliberative engagement methods into health data and technology policy, challenging data users and custodians to develop practices that would be trustworthy and equitable rather than extractive or exploitative.  

Natalie has worked extensively on the ethics and governance of data use in the health and technology sector, advising health ministries and companies internationally. She led UK research sector Parliamentary advocacy on GDPR as it was being implemented in domestic law, successfully ensuring essential research provisions for clinical trials were protected.

Prior to Wellcome, Natalie was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Humanities and Health at King’s College London, where she worked in the field of the philosophy of psychiatry. Her interdisciplinary research focus there was on using tools of philosophy of mind, language and psychology to interrogate how assessments of decision-making capacity are made for those with mental health conditions.

She is also a passionate advocate for public mental health and chaired a small organisation to promote positive mental health for all, Mindapples, as it developed from a social enterprise into a registered charity.

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