New Eltoukhy Future of Ethics Fellowship program encourages ethical examination by Stanford graduate students
Photography by Christine Baker
The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society names fellowship program for gift from alum Helmy Eltoukhy.
A generous gift to the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society is endowing a program that encourages PhD students to examine the ethical implications of their research. The gift from Helmy Eltoukhy, ’01, MS ’01, PhD ’06, will support graduate students pursuing studies across Stanford’s seven schools, equipping them to think as intentionally about the consequences of new technologies and discoveries as they do about building them.
The Eltoukhy Future of Ethics Fellowship program will equip scholars to shape future technologies, policies, and institutions after they leave Stanford, whether they are running a company, conducting a research project in a lab, or drafting legislation.
During their time with the program, admitted PhD students will be brought together for regular workshops and events to interrogate assumptions, rethink research methods, and critically investigate who benefits from—and who may be harmed by—societal changes.
Eltoukhy Future of Ethics Fellows will be mentored by Stanford faculty to help translate their ethical reflections into tangible actions and impact and convene with other fellows hosted by the center. The program will include an annual symposium that will allow fellows to share their insights with the broader Stanford community, and the Elthoukhy Future of Ethics Prize will provide follow-on funding to recognize outstanding research and contributions to the field of ethics that will extend beyond a fellow’s time with the program.
“Ethical inquiry belongs in every field of research, from economics and physics to chemical engineering and data science,” said Debra Satz, who is the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. “I am grateful that Helmy’s support will encourage admitted fellows as well as the broader Stanford community to think deeply about ethics in the potential repercussions of their discoveries.”
Eltoukhy earned three degrees at Stanford, culminating with a PhD in electrical engineering in 2006. He co-founded Avantome, a company focused on democratizing DNA sequencing, and is now co-founder, co-CEO, and board chair of Guardant Health, a precision oncology company that uses blood-based liquid biopsy tests to help detect, treat, and monitor cancer across all stages of care.
"Scholars developing the next generation of AI need to be thinking about agency and human purpose, and not outsourcing the ethical consequences of what they build to someone else,” Eltoukhy said. “Scientists developing gene-editing technologies should be asking where treatment ends and enhancement begins. Engineers building new data platforms should be thinking about privacy, ownership, and autonomy. All of those conversations need to engage philosophers, historians, economists, physicians, lawyers, and others who see dimensions of these problems that any one discipline will inevitably miss. Stanford is an extraordinary place to do this because so many people are actually creating the future here."
An interdisciplinary approach to ethics
The Eltoukhy Future of Ethics Fellowship program builds on an existing graduate fellowship program within the center. Past fellows’ research have spanned many disciplines, with topics as diverse as the ethical considerations of anti-aging research, legal decision-making and AI, and the potential of protein synthesis to be used as biological weapons.
Former fellowship recipient Alberto Tono, PhD ’26, said the program shaped his research on AI and graphics. For instance, when a conference reviewer suggested he cut the ethics section, he pushed back and successfully ensured those insights remained in the final publication. “This program provided a space for broad, meaningful conversations on a huge variety of issues and allowed me to build deep, trusting connections with a cohort of future leaders I can rely on,” Tono said.
June Choi, PhD ’26, who studies the economic impacts of climate change, said the fellowship offered something her own empirical work rarely allows: room for questions that resist tidy answers. She cited conversations that ranged from the moral responsibility sovereign nations owe one another to the ethics of embryo selection—the kinds of questions, Choi said, that “don't fit into a nice equation.”
Matthew Levine, a PhD student and member of the incoming fellowship cohort, said his research on the 19th-century practice of betting on elections relates to the same tensions between self-interest and the public good that are now playing out in modern election-prediction platforms. He explained he was drawn to the fellowship because his subject proves difficult to study in isolation. “I could not successfully understand the history of gambling unless I had a strong community of scholars who would be able to shed light on my subject from many different perspectives,” Levine said, adding that he hopes the fellowship will help him “assert with more confidence why my research matters in our present moment.”
“The next generation of ethical frameworks is unlikely to emerge fully formed from any one existing discipline. Many of the most important ideas will be found in the spaces between them,” said Rob Reich, who is the McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology, faculty director of the center’s Ethics, Society, and Technology Initiatives, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. "We hope the habits of mind that Stanford scholars build through the fellowship program—moving fluidly between disciplines, asking who benefits and who might be harmed—will travel with them into labs, companies, courtrooms, legislatures, and institutions, and shape future decades.”