Rate My Professor Angela Ballantyne

Professor Angela Ballantyne is a Professor in the Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice at the University of Otago, Wellington, within the Division of Health Sciences. She joined the department in 2010 as a part-time senior lecturer in Bioethics and teaches medical ethics in the fourth- and fifth-year ALM program, including lectures, tutorials, and essays on professional development, abortion, and paediatric ethics. She also provides guest lectures and workshops on research ethics for postgraduate education. Holding a BSc in Genetics and Molecular Biology from Victoria University, New Zealand, and a PhD in Bioethics from Monash University, Australia—during which she spent a year researching at Imperial College London—Ballantyne has held diverse international roles in schools of medicine, primary health care, and philosophy. These include Technical Officer for Genetics and Ethics in the Human Genetics unit at the World Health Organization in Geneva in 2005 and Visiting Scholar at Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics prior to her return to New Zealand.

Her research specializations include research ethics, global health policy and justice, exploitation and vulnerability, ethics of pregnancy and reproductive technologies, secondary use of clinical data, feminist bioethics, data ethics, and unconscious bias. She has secured the New Zealand Marsden Fast-Start Grant (2016) and the University of Otago Wellington Award for Best Emerging Researcher (2015). Key publications encompass the co-edited book Clinical Research Involving Pregnant Women (Springer, 2016); "Federation opacity and the promise of federated learning in healthcare" (American Journal of Bioethics, 2026); "A novel pathway for integrating ethics into digital technology design: A person-centred co-design approach" (Science and Engineering Ethics, 2026); and "Exploring the personal impact of cluttering: A scoping review of current evidence" (Journal of Fluency Disorders, 2026). Ballantyne served as President of the International Association of Bioethics (2016-2017) and as an ethics member on New Zealand's Health and Disability Ethics Committees (2010-2018). Current projects cover ethics of research using clinical data and tissue without explicit consent, frameworks for including pregnant women in research, and promoting best practices in surgical innovation. She delivered her Inaugural Professorial Lecture at the University of Otago Wellington in August 2025.