Associate Professor Rebekah McWhirter’s research sits at the intersection of health, ethics and law.
That interdisciplinary focus emerged during her postdoctoral research in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. She was investigating genetic risk factors associated with a cluster of vulvar cancer cases among young Aboriginal women in the region.
As the research progressed, she began to recognise that the questions she was encountering extended beyond genetics and into the ethics and governance of research.
“A lot of research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities has been very extractive and has eroded trust,” she says.“This is on the background of colonisation. Because of this, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to rebuild the trust, so that researchers can work with communities to achieve good health outcomes. Law has a role to play in this process, and that is what I am interested in.”
That experience shifted Rebekah's research toward the legal and ethical dimensions of health and medical research—particularly how genomics, human tissue samples and health data are governed and regulated, and how health research can be conducted ethically and with integrity.
Trust and trustworthiness in research have since become central to her work, with her translating research findings into practical policy and professional guidance.
Working with a national team led by Prof Alex Brown, Rebekah facilitated a two-day workshop earlier this year to develop a culturally appropriate governance framework for integrating precision medicine into healthcare, bringing together researchers, Aboriginal community members, and health practitioners.
For Rebekah, the goal was clear:
“We needed to develop a governance framework that Aboriginal communities could feel confident would protect their rights and interests, and that would reflect community priorities.”
The same concern extends beyond individual research projects and into Rebekah’s professional practice.
As the co-chair of the Education, Ethics and Social Issues Committee of The Human Genetics Society of Australasia, the peak body for genetics professionals in the region, she contributes to developing position statements that directly inform genomic healthcare practice. These statements cover areas including genetic testing, data return, and SRY gene testing in elite sport.
Rebekah is also applying these principles to the governance of research infrastructure.
Together with researchers from universities in Australia and Europe, Rebekah is involved in a project aiming to develop trustworthy governance for biorepositories and registries to responsibly regulate the use of Australian stem cell lines. The project has received almost $3 million in funding through the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) National Critical Research Infrastructure scheme.
Looking ahead to 2027, Rebekah will continue her work on the stem cell registry project while developing new research with colleagues to review and improve research ethics in Australia.
Rebekah shares the belief that health is shaped not only by biology and medicine, but also by the legal and governance systems surrounding research and health care.
“It's critical that human research is governed in a way that is trustworthy and that promotes high quality and safe research practice, so that participants are protected, and the wider public can maintain well-founded confidence in the research endeavour,” she says.