Chairperson and Executive Director

Mercury Shitindo is a bioethicist, research governance specialist, and global science policy advisor with over 21 years of experience shaping ethical research systems across Africa and globally. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Africa Bioethics Network (ABN), a pan-African platform spanning 42+ countries and over 1,300 members, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the African Journal of Bioethics.
Mercury's scholarship centres on advancing African ethical frameworks, grounded in Ubuntu, relational ethics, and decolonial approaches, as original intellectual contributions to global bioethics. She has developed the conceptual frameworks of ethical quieting and design parity, which examine how structural inequities shape AI governance and research design. Her work spans AI and data ethics, climate and environmental ethics, genomics, reproductive technologies, and equitable research partnerships, with a consistent focus on translating scholarship into policy, practice, and institutional infrastructure.
She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), where her research examines the legal, ethical, and policy landscape of reproductive technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Senegal.
In global governance, Mercury serves as a Consultant to the WHO Ethics Review Committee Secretariat and as an Ethics Expert for the European Commission Horizon Europe Ethics Appraisal Scheme. She holds senior elected and appointed governance roles as Researcher-Director on the ORCID Board, Member of the Standing Committee on Science at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and Steering Committee Member of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). She co-chairs the PHA4GE Artificial Intelligence Working Group and serves on the Governance Committee of the Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease Network (CSIDNet) and the Regulatory and Ethics Work Stream of GA4GH.
Mercury's research portfolio spans Wellcome Trust, British Academy, WHO, ORCID, and NCI-funded studies. Her active projects include the SHARE study on environmentally sustainable health research (Wellcome Trust, Kenya Country PI), a multi-country investigation of reproductive technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a landmark consultation study identifying 46 implementation barriers to GA4GH consent clauses in African genomics contexts, presented at the GA4GH 13th Plenary in Uppsala, Sweden in October 2025.
She is a widely recognised curriculum developer and trainer. As Lead Trainer and Curriculum Developer for the EthiXPERT Research Ethics Committee Administrators (RECA) course, a 12-module, 165-contact-hour programme, she has helped establish a continental standard for ethics administration capacity building across Africa. She also teaches ethics and regulatory science at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and King's College London.
As an editor and peer reviewer, Mercury serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the African Journal of Bioethics and Associate Editor of Research Ethics (SAGE Publications, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney). She is a peer reviewer for eLife, Springer Nature, and other international journals.
Mercury has been invited to present at major global forums, including the Bermuda Principles 30th Anniversary Conference, the GA4GH 13th Plenary, the National Ethics Councils Forum in Copenhagen, the Oxford Global Health and Bioethics International Conference, and the Global Health Justice Conference at Goethe University Frankfurt. She leads the BEACON Mentorship Programme, supporting 14+ early-career bioethicists across Africa through ABN's flagship publication incubator.
She is internationally recognised for advancing African-led bioethics scholarship as a generative contribution to global health, AI, and science governance — not merely as commentary on global standards, but as a source of frameworks, tools, and governance infrastructure that the world is increasingly drawing upon.