Nina Begus is a Berggruen Institute ToftH Researcher in residence at the Berkeley Lab where she works with Eoin Brodie’s group, focusing on philosophical stakes and the human implications of microbiome research. This project continues her dissertation research on artificial humanities (Comparative Literature, Harvard University) where she studied how literature informs our conceptions and reshapes implementations of novel technologies.

As the Harvard Merit/Term-Time Research Award and Mind Brain Behavior Graduate Student Award recipient, Begus was a visiting student at the University of Washington School of Medicine where she explored human responses to non-human entities using fictional prompts. Her essay on ‘The Identity Problem’ in Prenatal Testing won the Voices in Bioethics contest in reproductive ethics.