Ethics Beyond Compliance. Embedding dialogic reasoning in biomedical digital twin research.
We are proud to support Dr Daniela Boraschi, an Isaac Newton Trust Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Education, who is establishing a new approach to AI ethics. A social scientist and design scholar, Boraschi’s work explores the intersection of AI ethics, design, and education. Her work aims to empower discovery scientists to think about the social and ethical implications of their work through creative dialogue.
The main aim of this work is to bring ethics into everyday research decisions. Current AI‑ethics efforts focus heavily on regulation and risk management, often leaving scientists feeling disconnected from formal ethics processes. Boraschi’s research reframes ethics as something that unfolds during routine research decisions (such as choosing datasets, designing models, adjusting parameters, or imagining future applications). These moments, she argues, involve judgement and negotiation and should be recognised as opportunities for ethical reflection.
Her work uses design and creativity to make ethical engagement feel natural for scientists who think through screens, models, and code. A fictional vignette illustrates this shift: a scientist reviewing a proposal for a new research project on biomedical digital twins interacts with animations and conversational AI agents that prompt questions about responsibility, model trust, and governance. This is the basis of her work: what begins as a routine task becomes a space for imagination and critical thinking.
Drawing on two years of collaboration with machine learning scientists, including at the van der Schaar Lab, designers and public engagement scholars, Boraschi has developed a prototype to support ethical reasoning, which includes:
- Short digital animations that disrupt habitual thinking
- Three question‑asking LLMs designed to surface tensions and unfamiliar perspectives
- A web‑based platform that integrates these tools into research workflows
Together, these components aim to move ethics beyond “tick‑box” compliance and reopen it as an exploratory, dialogical practice.
As part of the project’s development, Boraschi has run co‑design workshops with her collaborators, including events at the Faculty of Education and the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM) Student Symposium. Her work has been published in The Lancet Digital Health, The American Journal of Bioethics, and the Journal of Communication. Her poster on dialogic ethics in biomedical digital twin research won the Best Poster Award at the 2026 Perspectives on the Societal Impact of Digital Twins conference at Anglia Ruskin University.
The next phase will refine the prototype, especially the AI agents, and use it to study how scientists engage with ethical questions in practice. The project will also explore how creative, dialogical methods can support responsible AI research and governance from the earliest stages. We look forward to seeing how this project develops and the next phase in Boraschi’s research.
Image credit: Dr Daniela Boraschi
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