Dr Catriona McMillan
Reader in Medical Law and Ethics
Director of Edinburgh Foundation for Women in Law
LLB (Hons), LLM, PhD
By Appointment
Tel: +44 (0)131 651 3836
Email: Catriona.McMillan@ed.ac.uk
View my publicationsCatriona (Katy) McMillan is a Reader in Medical Law and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh School of Law.
Dr McMillan holds an LLB from the University of Glasgow, an LLM from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD in Medical Law and Ethics from the University of Edinburgh. She joined the Law School in 2018 as a Senior Research Fellow, contributing to the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Confronting the Liminal Spaces of Health Research Regulation.’ She subsequently secured a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project entitled ‘Femtech: how should law and regulation respond?’.
Her research focuses on the legal and ethical regulation of human reproduction, and health technologies, with particular interests in:
Femtech, including period-tracking applications and digital contraception
Medical devices
Contraception
Assisted reproduction
Embryo research
Termination of pregnancy
In November 2025 she was awarded the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Dame Muriel Spark Medal. She is the author of The Human Embryo in vitro: Breaking the Legal Stalemate (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Health Research Regulation (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Dr McMillan is also Deputy Director of the JK Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law. From 2021 to 2023, she served as Convenor of the Law Society of Scotland’s Health and Medical Law Committee.
