Rate My Professor Bernadette Richards

Associate Professor Bernadette Richards, BA, LLB (Hons), PhD, serves as Associate Professor of Ethics and Professionalism and Director of Higher Degree Research at the University of Queensland Medical School in the Faculty of Medicine. She holds adjunct appointments as Associate Professor of Law at the Queensland University of Technology Australian Centre for Health Law Research and at Adelaide Law School. Richards was President of the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law from 2014 to 2024, now leads its Teaching Ethics Stream with lifetime membership, and sits on the NHMRC Australian Health Ethics Committee, Embryo Research Licensing Committee, and Dietary Guidelines Governance Committee. She previously chaired the Mitochondrial Donation Expert Working Committee, contributing to proposed legal amendments, and served on the South Australian Voluntary Assisted Dying Taskforce. An active researcher and supervisor, she is on the editorial board of the Medical Law Review and has completed major projects on organ donation, consent to treatment, and legal issues in innovative surgery.

Richards specializes in bioethics, health law, trustworthy data governance, health data sharing, consent to medical treatment, organ donation, regulation of health innovations, and medical device representatives in hospitals. She is chief investigator on key grants including the MRFF-funded Ethical Governance for Clinical Genomic Data (2022-2027), NHMRC Partnership Grant on strategies for including vulnerable populations in Advance Care Planning, NHMRC Ideas Grant on ethical, legal, and social implications of machine learning systems for diagnosis and screening, and ARC Discovery Grant on medical device representatives in Australian hospitals. Her books include Technology, Innovation and Healthcare: An Evolving Relationship (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022, with Mark Taylor and Susannah Sage Jacobson), Tort Law Principles (Thomson Reuters, 2017, with Melissa de Zwart), and Medical Law and Ethics: A Problem-Based Approach (LexisNexis Butterworths, 2014, with Jennie Louise). Notable recent publications are 'Device Reps in Theatre: Blurred Boundaries or Regulatory Gaps?' (Monash Bioethics Review, 2025), 'A Scientometric Review of Health Data Sharing for Secondary Use: Insights, Frontiers and the Path Ahead' (Health Information Management Journal, 2025), and 'Public Data Sharing Legislation, Privacy and Sharing of Health and Social Welfare Data in Australia: A Legal and Policy Document Analysis' (Data & Policy, 2025). Prior to UQ, she advanced trustworthy data governance research at the Singapore-ETH Centre Future Health Technologies Project.