Odia Kane, PhD, MPH, is an AI ethicist and policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Her work examines how artificial intelligence and digital health technologies are governed, marketed, and adopted, with attention to health equity and the communities most affected by these tools.
She earned her PhD in Health Policy and Management, with a focus on Bioethics and Health Policy, from Johns Hopkins University in 2025. She has a Master of Public Health (MPH) and a BA in Cognitive Science and Political Science from the University of Connecticut, where she completed a thesis on how race impacts perceptions of blame in instances of sexual assault on college campuses.
Her dissertation, Attitudes, Advertisements, and Access to Market: An Examination and Ethical Evaluation of Digital Therapeutics, studied which factors shape medical providers’ decisions to incorporate digital therapeutics into treatment plans, and how transparently these products are presented to patients and providers. With funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts, she has also studied how FDA-cleared AI-enabled medical devices might reproduce racial disparities. Her work has appeared in JAMA, The American Journal of Bioethics, Frontiers in Digital Health, Health Expectations, and Wellcome Open Research.
Her research on AI integration and regulation spans different domains. She led and contributed to a variety of interdisciplinary efforts in AI in healthcare, autonomous robots, forensics research, and Internet of Things (IoT) research. In addition to her empirical work, she has worked on several projects that build new tools for those who want to use AI and big data for human subjects research, medicine, and in government. These projects included collaborations with Sage Bionetworks, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and several others.
Odia aims to continue her efforts studying safe uses of AI, advising AI development, and managing AI governance approaches.