Genya Dana

Former Policy Scholar

Genya Dana currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the US Environmental Protection Agency, where she assists with stakeholder engagement in the agency’s nanotechnology risk research strategy development. She completed her PhD in ecological risk assessment and MSc in science, technology and environmental policy from University of Minnesota’s Conservation Biology Program and Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, respectively. She focuses on stakeholder engagement in risk analysis and governance, particularly in relationship to emerging technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and genetically engineered organisms. She conducted her dissertation research in South Africa, and continues to work internationally to train scientists and policy makers on participatory methods for evaluating ecological risks of introduced species and genotypes, often as part of agriculture and aquaculture development projects. Genya is joining the Science, Technology and Innovation Program as a Public Policy Scholar to explore whether a process called Comprehensive Environmental Assessment (CEA), which EPA has been investigating for nanotechnology, is applicable to synthetic biology. This includes examining whether CEA can be an effective screening tool for the initial framing and identification of risks across the life cycle of emerging synthetic biology applications. She is also helping design and test an interdisciplinary environmental risk assessment process for synthetic biology, focusing on hazard identification techniques used in the fields of invasion biology and engineering (e.g. event trees, hierarchical holographic modeling).

Genya is now an American Association for the Advancement of Science Scholar at the United States Department of State.