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David Lyreskog

Co-Director
David Lyreskog

I am a Senior Researcher with the Neuroscience, Ethics & Society (NEUROSEC) team in the Department of Psychiatry, and my current key roles include:

  • Deputy Director of the Design Bioethics Laboratory, with the Neuroscience, Ethics & Society (NEUROSEC) team at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, and the Wellcome Discovery Platform 'ANTITHESES'.
  • Co-Investigator on the Horizon Europe project 'AI-PROGNOSIS' – an international and multidisciplinary effort to develop an ethical ecosystem for diagnosis, prognosis, and disease management in Parkinson's Disease using Big Data and AI.
  • Lead Researcher on the Wellcome Ethics & Humanities research line 'Rethinking Collective Minds', investigating conceptual and ethical impacts of emerging technologies for collective thinking and decision-making.

My background being in the field of analytic philosophy, I have a MA in Philosophy from Umeå University, Sweden. My Magistrate (1 year MA) thesis explored the landscape of moral enhancement as a means for criminal rehabilitation (2013), and my Masters (2 year MA) thesis discussed ethical issues in decision-making processes leading up to deep brain stimulation (DBS) in paediatric populations (2014).

My PhD thesis, The Ethics of Mind Maintenance (2020), analysed ethical trade-offs in the context of emerging technologies aimed at preventing and treating age-related neural decline and disease. The project sought to facilitate our understanding of the value trade-offs involved in utilising technologies for neurodegenerative diseases, the aim being to provide a guiding and ethically sound decision-making structure for patients and other users of the technologies.

Between 2019 and 2021 I worked on the Wellcome-funded project BeGOOD Early Intervention Ethics in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, developing novel tools for bioethics research and engagement with young people. In this project, we built a digital game – 'Tracing Tomorrow' – to study the values and preferences of young people in the context of digital phenotyping for mental health in schools.

While I am broadly interested in impactful research and innovation in the intersection of neuroscience, psychiatry, and technology, specific domains of interests include ethical analysis, decision-making, and innovation in:

  • New and emerging neurotechnologies;
  • Mental health in child and adolescent populations;
  • Exercise, sports, and health;
  • Diagnosis, prevention, and treatment strategies for neurodegenerative disease;
  • Frailty and multimorbidity;
  • Artificial, Hybrid, and Collective Intelligence.

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