Dr. Kadija Ferryman & Dr. Sophie Zaaijer

Teaches at Genspace NYC

Dr. Kadija Ferryman is a cultural anthropologist whose research examines how cultural and moral values are embedded in digital health information, social influences on health, and the ethics of digital health research. She earned a BA in Anthropology from Yale University, and a PhD in the Anthropology from The New School for Social Research. 

Before completing her PhD, she was a policy researcher at the Urban Institute where she studied how housing and neighborhoods impact well-being, specifically the effects of public housing redevelopment on children, families, and older adults.She has published research in journals such as Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, European Journal of Human Genetics, and Genetics in Medicine. She is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Data and Society Research Institute.

Dr. Sophie Zaaijer is currently a Runway Startup Postdoc at Cornell Tech and she is founder of F!ND, a Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute backed startup company. She did her postdoctoral research in Dr. Yaniv Erlich’s lab at the New York Genome Center and Columbia University after completing her PhD in molecular biology and genetics at Cancer Research UK in London. 

She previously co-founded PlayDNA; a company that brings hands-on genomics and data science education into the middle, high school and undergraduate education system. Her scientific work has been covered by numerous media channels, such as: Science Magazine, The Atlantic Weekly, GenomeWeb, Nature Biotechnology, and others. 

She has also written magazine articles for the Pathologist and NEO.life.