Nishakanthi Gopalan
Dr. Nishakanthi (Nisha) Gopalan is a Senior Lecturer at the Medical Humanities and Ethics Unit (MedHEU), Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia where she also serves as Programme Coordinator for the Master of Health Research Ethics (MOHRE)—the first postgraduate programme in research ethics in Southeast Asia. She holds a PhD in Research Ethics and is a Deputy Chair of the Universiti Malaya Research Ethics Committee (UMREC) as well as an external member of the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC) Medical Research Ethics Committee. Dr. Gopalan is actively engaged in teaching and training, having developed the Introduction to Health Research Ethics course on FutureLearn and co-facilitating the APRU Health Research Ethics course. She is also an editorial board member of the Asian Bioethics Review.
Her research spans research ethics, bioethics, and clinical ethics, with particular interest in emerging technologies such as regenerative medicine, stem cells, genetic testing, and artificial intelligence in healthcare. She is experienced in qualitative research methods, including in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, thematic analysis, grounded theory, and scoping reviews. Dr. Gopalan is currently involved in several funded projects, including a bioethics training grant with Johns Hopkins University under the Fogarty International Center (NIH, US), a study on the ethics of genetic testing for Parkinson’s disease (USMC Care Fund), and a project on ethics committee deliberation processes. She is committed to advancing research ethics capacity in low- and middle-income countries and actively seeks collaborations at the local, regional, and international levels.