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Nigel Cameron

Nigel M. de S. Cameron is an inter-disciplinary scholar, facilitator and communicator who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic and initiated projects at the interface of science, technology, values, business, and policy. A graduate of Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and the Edinburgh Business School, he is currently President and CEO of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET), Washington’s first nonpartisan think tank focused on the long-term policy impacts of emerging technologies.

Before founding C-PET, he served as a Research Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Law of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), where he also directed an institute on biotechnology policy and established the first U.S. university-based center on nanotechnology and its social implications, chairing its annual conferences for policymakers in Washington, DC, and initiating the Chicago Nano Forum for city business, law and technology leaders. He also led a study of the multi-sectoral implications of diabetes for IIT’s Center for Diabetes Research and Policy, and convened a national conference on diabetes policy with participation from such actors as PAHO, HHS, and the State of Illinois. He is a Fellow of the World Technology Association and a finalist in the 2011 World Technology Awards.

He has written widely on the policy and ethics implications of emerging technologies, both at an academic level and in popular media. He has appeared on such network television programs as ABC Nightline and PBS Frontline, and been published in many contexts including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the London Guardian – as well as law reviews, Nature Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology Law and Business. In 1983 he founded the journal Ethics and Medicine, and his books include The New Medicine: Life and Death after Hippocrates and Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century. In addition to essays on innovation and technology policy, he currently writes a regular column for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the corporate social responsibility impacts of new technologies.