Eleonore Pauwels is an international science policy expert, who specializes in the governance of emerging technologies, including genomics and genome-editing, participatory health design, and citizen science. At the Wilson Center, she is the Director of Biology Collectives, within the Science and Technology Innovation Program. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and in collaboration with Todd Kuiken at NC-State, Eleonore directs the Citizen Health Innovators Project. Her research focuses on developing governance mechanisms for the fast-growing ecosystem of health innovators, built around maker spaces and community bio labs, to support responsible innovation in distributed networks. She is particularly interested in the perils and promises of personal genomics, and how to harness this trove of data and techniques to truly, ethically empower citizens in different societal contexts and cultures.