NEUROETHICS ASIA 2026
Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Neuroethics
Singapore
6 & 7 November, 2026
Research abstracts deadline
31 May 2026
Registration opens
25 May 2026
Registration closes
31 August 2026
About the Conference
What does it mean to govern the brain responsibly — and who gets to decide?
Neuroethics Asia 2026: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Neuroethics aims to address the field’s most urgent challenges. Global debates on AI, brain–machine interfaces, mental health, and brain organoid research have too often been shaped by a single Western paradigm. How do concepts of personhood, community, and moral responsibility differ across societies shaped by Confucian, Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu, and secular traditions? How should governance frameworks reflect this plurality without erasing it? And what pioneering scholarship is already flourishing across Asia that deserves a prominent place in the global conversation?
Hosted by the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, in collaboration with the International Neuroethics Society and the Oxford–NUS Centre for Neuroethics, AI & Society, attendees will engage with world-leading keynote speakers, a distinguished cross-cultural panel, and parallel sessions showcasing new empirical, philosophical, and policy work from around the world. We welcome participants from all disciplines and career stages. Whether your background is in neuroscience, philosophy, law, medicine, or public policy, Neuroethics Asia 2026 has a place for you.
Abstracts previously submitted to the International Neuroethics Society (INS) are also welcome. Please resubmit via the Abstract Submission portal.
Programme - Day 1
*Programme details are subject to change
| Time | Programme | |
|---|---|---|
| 8.30am to 9.00am | Registration & Coffee | |
| 9.00am to 9.15am | Welcoming Address | |
| 9.15am to 10.00am | Keynote: Professor Ilina Singh, University of Oxford | |
| 10.00am to 10.35am |
Distinguished Panel: Assoc Professor Brian D. Earp (Chair), Professor Ilina Singh, Professor Sakura Osamu, Professor Insoo Hyun, Professor Marcello Ienca |
|
| 10.35am to 11.00am | Coffee Break | |
| 11.00am to 11.35am | Plenary Speaker: Professor Wang Guoyu, Fudan University | |
| 11.35am to 12.10pm | Plenary Speaker: Professor Fukushi Tamami, Tokyo Online University | |
| 12.10pm to 1.10pm | Lunch Break | |
| 1.10pm to 3.20pm |
Parallel Sessions Venue: Cluny, Dalvey and Evans |
|
| 3.20pm to 4.50pm | Poster Presentations | |
Programme - Day 2
*Programme details are subject to change
| Time | Programme | |
|---|---|---|
| 8.30am to 9.00am | Registration & Coffee | |
| 9.00am to 9.15am | Welcoming Address | |
| 9.15am to 10.00am | Keynote: Professor Sakura Osamu, Jissen Women's University | |
| 10.00am to 10.35am | Plenary Speaker: To be Confirmed | |
| 10.35am to 11.00am | Coffee Break | |
| 11.00am to 11.35am | Plenary Speaker: Professor Karen Yan, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University | |
| 11.35am to 12.10pm | Plenary Speaker: Professor Andrew McGee, Queensland University of Technology | |
| 12.10pm to 1.10pm | Lunch Break | |
| 1.10pm to 5.00pm |
Parallel Sessions Venue: Cluny, Dalvey and Evans |
|
Keynote & Distinguished Panel
Assoc Prof Brian D. Earp is Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics and, by courtesy, Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Psychology at NUS, where he directs the EARP Lab (Experimental Bioethics, Artificial Intelligence, and Relational Moral Psychology Lab). He also directs the Oxford-NUS Centre for Neuroethics and Society and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics. Brian’s research integrates experimental methods from cognitive science and experimental social psychology with normative questions from philosophy and ethics, spanning moral psychology, AI ethics, and bioethics. He holds a dual Ph.D. in philosophy and psychology from Yale University, where he co-developed the relational norms model with Molly Crockett and Margaret Clark. His work has appeared in Nature Communications, Psychological Review, Cognition, Nature Machine Intelligence, and other venues, and he is a co-recipient of the 2018 Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Professor Ilina Singh is a Professor of Neuroscience & Society in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, and leads the Neuroscience, Ethics and Society (NEUROSEC) Team. She also co-directs the £4.5m Wellcome-funded Oxford Platform for Transformative Bioethics. In a continuous series of Wellcome Trust-funded projects (2008 – 2029), Professor Singh pioneered the development of ecologically valid, technology-forward, co-design methodologies to investigate intuitions, values and experiences around pivotal health, social and environmental dilemmas, including novel psychiatric interventions, AI, and nature exposure. The NEUROSEC Team’s work is largely focused on young people and is deeply informed by working with the NeurOx Young People’s Advisory Group. Professor Singh’s current projects include leading the Oxford Human-Nature Health Research Platform, bringing together rigorous science and real-world delivery to transform the ways that nature can support and improve mental health and wellbeing. In 2025 she was honoured with the Steven E. Hyman Award for Distinguished Service by the International Society for Neuroethics.
Professor Insoo Hyun is one of the foremost bioethicists working at the frontier of neuroscience and emerging biotechnology. He holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and serves as the Inaugural Director of the Center for Life Sciences and Public Learning at Boston’s Museum of Science — a role that reflects his longstanding commitment to bridging rigorous scholarship and public engagement. Previously Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine for more than 18 years, he is a Fulbright Scholar and Hastings Center Fellow. Professor Hyun led the NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded Brainstorm Project — a landmark collaboration with scientists at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford — developing the first ethical framework for human brain organoid research. He has been deeply involved with the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) since 2005, helping draft its international research guidelines and serving twice as Chair of its Ethics Committee. He currently serves on the Neuroethics Subgroup of the NIH BRAIN 2.0 Working Group and has served on national commissions for the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Brown University and is the author of Bioethics and the Future of Stem Cell Research (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Professor Marcello Ienca is one of the most influential voices in global neuroethics and the incoming President of the International Neuroethics Society (2026–2028). He holds the inaugural Chair in Ethics of AI and Neuroscience at the Technical University of Munich, where he also serves as Deputy Director of the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine, and maintains a second appointment at EPFL (Switzerland), where he leads the research group on Ethics of Intelligent Systems. His scholarship sits at the intersection of neurotechnology, artificial intelligence, human rights, and data governance, and he is widely credited with pioneering the concept of “neurorights” — the argument that rapid advances in brain science require an expansion of international human rights frameworks. He is a member of the UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on the Ethics of Neurotechnology, an appointed expert and rapporteur to the Council of Europe’s Convention 108 Committee, and has written policy reports for the OECD, the European Parliament, and the United Nations Human Rights Council. He completed his PhD in Biomedical Ethics at the University of Basel with summa cum laude honours, following studies in philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Rome, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, NYU, and KU Leuven.
Professor Sakura Osamu is a pioneering figure in Asian neuroethics who helped bring rigorous ethical inquiry into neuroscience onto the Japanese and East Asian agenda. Now a Professor at Jissen Women’s University, he brings an extraordinary breadth of perspective to questions about how neuroscience intersects with culture, society, and governance. Professor Sakura’s intellectual journey began with a PhD in the behavioural ecology of wild chimpanzees from Kyoto University in 1992, followed by positions at Yokohama National University, a visiting research fellowship at the University of Freiburg in Germany, and a professorship at the University of Tokyo. This trajectory—from evolutionary biology through science and technology studies—gives his scholarship an exceptionally wide and comparative lens. He was central to the country’s first neuroethics research group, launched in 2004 under the Japan Science and Technology Agency’s Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society — the first such initiative in Asia. His research spans the ethical governance of brain-machine interfaces (BMI), as well as cross-cultural comparative studies examining how neuroethical questions play out differently across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Western contexts.
Plenary Speakers
Professor Andrew McGee is a legal and philosophical scholar with rare dual expertise in the ethics and law of healthcare decisions, holding a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Essex and a Master of Law from QUT. Before joining QUT in 2010, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in philosophy at University College Dublin and practised as a lawyer at Allens Arthur Robinson and the Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel. His research centres on end-of-life decision-making — including euthanasia, voluntary assisted dying, and the withdrawal of life-prolonging treatment — as well as the definition of death in clinical and legal contexts, the ethics of embryonic stem cell research, organ donation, and utilitarian versus deontological approaches to healthcare. He has published extensively in journals including Bioethics, the Medical Law Review, the Journal of Medical Ethics, and the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Medical Law and Ethics. Professor McGee contributes a rigorous legal-philosophical framework for interrogating the rights, responsibilities, and regulatory challenges that neurotechnology raises — particularly around consent, personhood, and end-of-life contexts.
Professor Fukushi Tamami is a pioneering figure in Asian neuroethics. She holds a PhD in Behavioral Science from Hokkaido University and conducted postdoctoral research in motor control neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the ethics of neurotechnology, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), science policy, and regulatory science. She launched her career in neuroethics in 2005 at the Japan Science and Technology Agency, and organised the first international neuroethics symposium in the Asian region in July 2006. She has since been an active contributor to the Global Neuroethics Summit, the International Brain Initiative Neuroethics Working Group, the IEEE Neuroethics Framework, and the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC43 standards process, and from 2025 serves as a steering committee member of the OECD BNCT project. She participated as an expert member of the Japanese delegation to the UNESCO Intergovernmental Meeting on the Ethics of Neurotechnology in May 2025. Professor Fukushi brings two decades of experience building neuroethics capacity across Asia, and offers a vital East Asian policy and regulatory science perspective on the responsible development of neurotechnology
Professor Karen Yan is a philosopher of cognitive neuroscience whose work sits at the intersection of philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine, and the epistemology of interdisciplinary research. Her research investigates how cognitive neuroscientists construct knowledge of brain networks — examining the structural versus non-structural knowledge produced by techniques such as fMRI and graph-theoretic analysis — as well as computational philosophy of biomedical sciences and cross-cultural philosophy of science. She has published in leading journals including Nature Human Behaviour, Synthese, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In 2023, she was awarded the Wu Da-you Memorial Award by Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council, one of the most competitive recognitions for young researchers in the country. Professor Yan brings rigorous philosophical scrutiny of the methods and knowledge claims of neuroscience itself, equipping the conference with the analytical tools needed to critically examine what brain science can and cannot tell us about human cognition and identity.
Professor Wang Guoyu is a leading authority on science and technology ethics in China. She holds a Bachelor of Philosophy from Fudan University, a Master’s degree in Philosophy and German Language and Literature from the Free University of Berlin, and a PhD in Philosophy from Dalian University of Technology. Her research spans biomedical ethics, nanoethics, digital ethics, AI governance, and the ethical governance of emerging technologies. She directs both the Applied Ethics Research Center and the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Fudan University, and serves as Dean of the Institute of Technology Ethics for Human Future. She is Chief Expert of a Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of China on ethical issues in high technology, and has published in Nature Human Behaviour on the role of ethics committees in promoting responsible research and innovation in China. Professor Wang brings an authoritative Chinese institutional and philosophical perspective on how emerging technologies — including neurotechnology — should be governed, and how non-Western regulatory traditions can contribute to genuinely global ethical framework
Conference Organising Committee
- Sawai Tsutomu, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University
- Brian D. Earp, Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore
- David Lyreskog, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford
- Adrian Carter, Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University
- Fukushi Tamami, Faculty of Human Welfare, Tokyo Online University
- Aimi Nadia Mohd Yusof, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Teknologi MARA
- Pu Jiangbo, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Peking Union Medical College
- Jeong Sung-Jin, Korea Brain Research Institute
- Soraj Hongladarom, Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University
- Ma Yonghui, Centre for Bioethics, School of Medicine, Xiamen University
- Karen Yan, Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
Conference Venue
Kent Ridge Guild House NUSS
Cluny, Dalvey & Evans Room
Level 2, 9 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore 119241
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