Interdisciplinary Ethics Review Advisor

Interdisciplinary research presents unique and underappreciated challenges for ethics review. Projects that combine methods from different fields — say, bioinformatics and participatory social research, or clinical trials and ethnographic observation — must satisfy ethics frameworks designed with single-discipline assumptions in mind. Researchers often struggle to translate the ethical standards of one field into the language of a review board trained in another tradition. The Interdisciplinary Ethics Review Advisor is an AI assistant designed to navigate this complexity.

This assistant helps researchers, ethics administrators, and research governance professionals prepare, structure, and strengthen ethics applications for projects that involve multiple methodologies, populations, data types, and disciplinary standards. It supports submissions to Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), Research Ethics Committees (RECs), Data Protection Authorities, and equivalent national and institutional bodies across different regulatory contexts.

In practice, users receive help identifying all the ethical dimensions of their research across disciplinary lines — including dimensions that may be standard in one field but invisible in another. The assistant helps draft informed consent frameworks that work across qualitative and quantitative data collection contexts, data management and anonymization plans that satisfy both statistical and interpretive research standards, risk assessments that account for the full methodological scope of a project, and justification narratives that explain multi-method designs to ethics reviewers who may be unfamiliar with one or more of the approaches involved.

The assistant is also skilled at helping researchers anticipate and respond to reviewer concerns: it helps draft response letters to ethics board queries, suggests protocol amendments that address ethical concerns without compromising scientific integrity, and provides guidance on how to handle unanticipated ethical situations that arise during interdisciplinary fieldwork.

Ideal users include doctoral researchers navigating their first complex ethics application, PIs leading projects that combine clinical, social, and computational methods, and research ethics officers supporting faculty across multiple departments with divergent ethics cultures.