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Noor Munirah Isa has joined the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya as a senior lecturer since 2014. Currently she teaches ethics in science as well as media and public understanding of science. She received her PhD in bioethics, an interesting multidisciplinary field of study, from the same department in September 2013. Her doctoral thesis was basically a study on how Muslim scholars assess selected applications of modern biotechnology from Islamic perspective, and how they deal with conventional perspective in this regard.

She has a keen interest on the subject of Islam, Muslim and science since high school. Inspired by the Muslim medieval polymaths, she studied biotechnology and Islamic studies for her bachelor’s degree. She was among the first batch of University of Malaya Applied Science with Islamic Studies undergraduate program who graduated in September 2007.

Her research interests are in the area of science, technology and society, mainly on ethical and religious perspectives on issues in science and technology. Her current research project aims to explore ethical issues in human germline gene editing from Islamic perspectives and to expound Islamic ethical concepts and principles that can enrich discussion on this topic and help in formulating ethical guidelines. One of the outputs of this project entitled “Islamic perspectives on CRISPR/Cas9-mediated human germline gene editing: A preliminary discussion” was published in Science and Engineering Ethics journal in 2019. Apart from that, she is also interested in cross-cultural study of religious and cultural perspectives on human genome editing and bioethics in general. Recently, she received Global Forum on Bioethics of Research Project Fellowship from Wellcome Trust to study ethics of human genome editing from Islamic and Confucian perspectives. She also received AUA Scholars Award 2020-2021 that enables her to start exploring the influence of religion on bioethics in society specifically in Thailand. 

She sees science communication as a crucial field of study in Malaysia and hopes that more research can be done in this area. As a start, she conducted a small research project in 2014-2016 that aimed to examine the role of Malay science fiction novels in communicating ethics in science and technology to the Malaysian public. She has also supervised postgraduate's research projects on Malaysian public knowledge, awareness and attitudes towards many topics including vaccination, dengue fever and medical cannabis.