Ms. Mercury Shitindo
Affiliation
Chair and Executive Director of the Africa Bioethics Network (ABN)
Committee membership
Standing Committee on Science
Biography
Mercury Shitindo is an internationally recognized bioethicist and health research governance expert with over two decades of experience advancing ethical, inclusive health research across Africa and globally. She is Chair and Executive Director of the Africa Bioethics Network (ABN), a pan-African platform in over 40 countries supporting ethical research governance, capacity building, and policy engagement.
Her work focuses on emerging areas of health research, including AI in healthcare, climate–health ethics, public health genomics governance, data governance, reproductive technologies, and research integrity. She served as Consultant to the WHO Headquarters Ethics Review Committee Secretariat, contributing to ethical review and governance of multi-country health research.
Mercury is a Researcher-Director on the ORCID Board of Directors, contributing to global governance of research infrastructure and scholarly identity systems. She is Co-Chair of the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE) AI Working Group, leading on responsible AI and data governance in public health genomics, and contributes to ethics and regulatory initiatives within the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). She serves on the Governance Committee of the Climate-Sensitive Infectious Disease Network (CSIDNet), supporting oversight at the climate–health–equity interface.
She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the African Journal of Bioethics, a bilingual, diamond open-access journal advancing equitable and African-led knowledge production. She has led internationally funded initiatives supported by the Wellcome Trust, WHO, ORCID, the British Academy, and King's College London, focusing on sustainable research systems, ethics-by-design, and global health equity. Her work bridges global governance and local realities, grounded in applied ethics and African relational values.
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