Professor Natalie Ram (with co-author Professor Jessica Roberts from Emory University School of Law) received the Ian Kerr Best Paper Award at the 2026 Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) in May.
The winning paper titled, “Surveilling the Sewer,” builds on Ram’s previous work on wastewater surveillance, which includes the 2025 article, “Wastewater-Based Detection of a Rare SARS-CoV-2 Variant in a Hospital Setting: Implications for Individual-Level Resolution,” in Environments (with others); her 2023 article published in Science titled, Ethical and Legal Wastewater Surveillance (with others); and “The Future of Wastewater Monitoring for the Public Health,” published in the University of Richmond Law Review in 2022 (with others).
In June, Ram was quoted in “Cities and Schools Are Testing Wastewater for Illicit Drugs” in The New York Times.
A professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Ram teaches advanced bioethics courses in the top-ranked Law and Health Care Program, as well as Civil Procedure and Property. Ram is also adjunct faculty with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.
She is a leading scholar on the intersection of genetic privacy and the law. Her work has been published in both law reviews and scientific journals, including Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Texas Law Review, Science, and Nature Biotechnology. Ram has also been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Slate and interviewed on NPR’s “Science Friday,” “Here & Now,” and “Reveal.” She was a 2021 Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics and is an elected member of the American Law Institute.
The annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference brings together privacy law scholars and practitioners from around the world to discuss current issues in information privacy law and policy and to workshop emerging scholarship. This year’s convening was hosted by the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington. Previous hosts include Georgetown University, UCLA School of Law, UC Berkeley, and George Washington University.
Ram and Roberts presented “Surveilling the Sewer” at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference. Ram has also presented on wastewater monitoring for the National Wastewater Surveillance System Utilities Community of Practice and at the University of Richmond School of Law.
“I am really thrilled that this paper has been recognized for the Ian Kerr Best Paper Award at PLSC,” said Ram. “My co-author Jessica Roberts and I are passionate about this project, and it's exciting to have such a vote of confidence from top-notch peers in privacy law.”