Helena Machado: Ethics, facial recognition & healthcare
Helena Machado is visiting the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics.
MEET A GUEST RESEARCHER | Facial recognition and other biometric AI technologies are increasingly used to support decision‑making in both public and clinical settings. This raises increasingly urgent questions about bias, consent and accountability. Helena Machado is examining how these technologies shape healthcare, identity and public governance.
Uppsala University’s Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics welcomes guest researcher Helena Machado, Research Professor at Center for Research and Studies (CIES-Iscte), University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. From September 2025 through May 2026, she will spend a total of three months at the Centre, investigating how facial recognition technologies are being developed for diagnostic purposes, and what this shift means for patients, professionals and public trust.
Helena Machado is a sociologist of science and technology with extensive experience studying emerging technologies for human identification. Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant project fAIces – Facial Recognition Technologies: Etho-Assemblages and Alternative Futures, which examines the social and ethical implications of facial recognition technologies.
“When facial recognition is used in healthcare, it shapes who is recognised accurately, who is overlooked, and who may be placed at risk because of misinterpretation,” says Helena Machado.
“These tools may offer diagnostic promise, but their impacts depend on the datasets, assumptions, and clinical workflows that make them work. Tracing who becomes visible—and on what terms—is essential for governance and safeguards that protect patients, support meaningful consent, and promote equitable access to emerging AI tools.
These are issues that need to be addressed through interdisciplinary collaboration. Helena Machado will work closely with Niklas Juth, professor of clinical medical ethics at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and other researchers at the Centre with expertise in public and health care practitioners’ perspectives on AI in healthcare, and in biomedicine and genomics.
“Helena Machado’s work on how new and emerging technologies are deployed in healthcare marries well with ours,” says Niklas Juth. “Facial recognition technologies raise complex ethical questions, and this visit contributes to strengthening our ability to address issues such as fairness, bias and accountability in emerging diagnostic tools.”
The visit will also contribute to Helena Machado’s ongoing research projects fAIces – Facial Recognition Technologies: Etho-Assemblages and Alternative Futures (ongoing, ERC Advanced Grant, 2025–2030) which investigates how facial recognition technologies (or FRTs, fort short) reconfigure identity, governance, and ethics, focusing on public imaginaries, developer perspectives, and resistance practices, and the Bridging Perspectives (approved for funding, FCT, 2025–2028), which develops participatory strategies to involve diverse publics in AI governance, with an emphasis on equity, deliberation, and institutional accountability.
By Anna Holm Bodin
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