Jess Morley is a de Vries-Sherif Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Digital Ethics Center. Her research asks why digital technologies and AI so often fail to deliver meaningful improvements in health systems, and what evidence, governance, and infrastructure are needed to change that.
Her work spans the evaluation of AI in healthcare, the operationalisation and governance of AI ethics, digital and AI policy, and population-health data science. Her current research programme develops a systems-level approach to healthcare AI, shifting the focus from individual risk prediction towards improving population health. In all her work, Jess draws on philosophy, public health, informatics, social science, and implementation science, with a particular emphasis on translating conceptual work into practical tools, policies, and institutional change.
Before joining Yale, Jess was Policy Lead at the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford and an AI subject matter expert for the UK Department of Health and Social Care. She was the lead researcher for Better, Broader, Safer, the UK Government-commissioned review that shaped national health-data infrastructure, and was part of the OpenSAFELY team analysing NHS records at national scale.
Jess has published more than 100 academic papers, including work in Nature, The Lancet, BMJ, and Social Science & Medicine. She sits on the National Data Guardian Panel in the UK, NHS England’s AI Advisory Group, and the advisory board for the LSHTM Centre for Data and Statistical Science for Health. At Yale, as well as being a member of the Digital Ethics Center, she is faculty for the School of Medicine’s AI in Medicine Distinction Pathway, and created the Beyond the Hype: Thinking Critically about AI in Healthcare open access course.