Andrea Downing
As the co-founder and Board President of The Light Collective, Andrea Downing leads efforts to advance rights, interests, and voices of patient communities adopting emerging technology. Andrea co-authored the Patient AI Rights Initiative, the only patient-led effort to independently define ethical goals and guardrails for Health AI. As a privacy & security researcher, her investigations into privacy vulnerabilities—such as security risks in “Closed” Facebook groups for health-related support—revealed systemic issues in social media platforms’ treatment of sensitive health data. This work sparked widespread attention, leading to regulatory responses from bodies such as the FTC and HHS, which have moved to restrict the use of surveillance trackers in healthcare contexts. Beyond her leadership roles, Andrea is a Stanford Medicine X ePatient Scholar and an advisor to multiple national initiatives, including CancerX Moonshot and the National Academy of Medicine’s AI Code of Conduct workgroup. Her published work addresses critical issues in health advertising privacy, peer support for cancer patients, and the ethics of digital health innovation.
