Dr. Marieke Bak

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin

Marieke Bak is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine (IGEM) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Marieke Bak is a bioethicist with a strong interest in technology and innovation, as well as in international health policy. Her current research focus is on the ethics of data-driven care, which includes the ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI).

She received her PhD in medical ethics from the University of Amsterdam (NL), with a thesis about the ethics of collecting and using big data in an international cardiac arrest research project. During that time she was also Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute (UK) where she worked on post-mortem data privacy in healthcare. Afterwards, her postdoc project in Amsterdam focused on the ethics of using AI for risk prediction in cardiovascular care. She has participated in succesful grant applications for external funding, including Horizon projects with an ethics work package, to the sum of approximately 1.5 million EUR.

Before working in bioethics, she conducted qualitative research about prevention of communicable and non-communicable diseases in Scotland and Kazakhstan. Marieke Bak holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology (with honours), and master’s degrees in Philosophy, Bioethics and Health, as well as in Management and Policy Analysis in the Health and Life Sciences (cum laude). Today, her methodological approach continues to include empirical research as a supplement to normative analysis. Since she came to TUM, she has been involved in several projects that explicity use the interdisciplinary and practice-oriented approach of embedded ethics (EE), developed by the Institute.

At TUM, she works on a project about improving the care trajectory of cancer patients through innovative design and data-driven conversation tools and prediction models. There, with other ethicists and in close collaboration with the project partners and patient representatives, she aims to embed ethics into the development process. Before that, she was involved at TUM as embedded ethicist in another interdisciplinary collaboration with roboticists, social scientists and legal experts about robots in elderly care.

Marieke Bak is also affiliated with the Department of Ethics, Law and Humanities of the Amsterdam UMC. There, she teaches medical ethics, supervises PhD students, is a member of ethics committees, and coordinates an interdisciplinary working group on „Technology and Good Care“. She is a board member of the Amsterdam Public Health Insitute’s Personalized Medicine programme and of the Dutch Society of Bioethics.