Melissa Goldstein is a Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University and a national expert in privacy and security law and ethics. Goldstein is an advisory board member of the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) and a former member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), the statutory public advisory body to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) for health data, statistics, privacy, and national health information policy and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). She also co-chaired the NCVHS privacy, confidentiality, and security subcommittee.

In 2015-2016, Goldstein served as the Assistant Director for Bioethics and Privacy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Previously, she served as a senior advisor to the Chief Privacy Officer in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, HHS.

Professor Goldstein teaches courses in health policy, bioethics, and public health ethics (including genomics, privacy, reproductive ethics, end-of-life, and research ethics issues), health information technology policy, data ethics, and public health law and conducts research on privacy and security legal issues and the legal and policy aspects of health information technology and big data. Goldstein serves as a member of GW’s IRB, the GWU hospital ethics committee, and the GWU living donor advocacy committee, and speaks frequently on issues in privacy and security, data ethics, bioethics, AI ethics, and health policy. Professor Goldstein’s recent research and writings have focused on revisions in the CARES Act to the federal law governing confidentiality of substance use information, the definition of identifiability in law regarding human participants in research, and privacy and security issues in health information exchange and the use of big data.