Laurie Zoloth

Last updated

Laurie Zoloth (born 1950) is an American ethicist, currently Margaret E. Burton Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She was the first Jewish dean of the Divinity School and served in the position from 2017 [1] to 2018, whereupon she was invited to serve as the first Senior Advisor on Programs on Social Ethics for the University, an advisory administrative position. [2]

Contents

Ethicist

Laurie Zoloth writes in the fields of religious studies and bioethics, with a focus on ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, synthetic biology, and social justice in health care. She is the author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 1999); “Second Texts and Second Opinions: Essays Toward a Jewish Bioethics” (Oxford University Press, 2022); “Ethics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought” (Oxford University Press, 2023); “May We Make the World: Gene Drives, Malaria, and the Future of Nature” (MIT Press, 2023)and editor (with Dena Davis) of Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics (University Publishing Group, 1999); “The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate”, (with Karen LeBacqz and Suzanne Holland) (MIT 2001); “Margin of Error: Mistakes in Medicine and Bioethics” (with Susan Rubin) (University Press Publishing Group, 2003); Oncofertility: Ethical, Legal, Social and Medical Perspectives,(with Teresa Woodruff) (Springer, 2010; and (with Elliot Dorff) Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought (Jewish Publication Society, 2015).

She was co-founder of The Ethics Practice, a group that has provided bioethics consultation and education services to health care providers and health care systems nationally. She was the chair of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute National Bioethics Advisory Board for seven years. She served on the NASA National Advisory Board, which is the agency’s highest civilian committee; the NASA IACUC, NASA's Interagency National Animal Care and Use Committees, the NASA International Planetary Advisory Board, and currently serves on the NASA Ethics Committee. She was on the first national advisory board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion and was a member of both the American Heart Association’s Ethics Board and the AACOG National Ethics Board. She was on the founding board of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, serving as the first chair of its ethics committee, and on the founding board of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH.) She was a member of the CDC’s Working Group on Emerging Biological Agents and served on several NIH Data Safety and Monitoring Committees. She served on the NIH’s Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (the National RAC) for six years.

Zoloth has been both the president of the American Academy of Religion [3] and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. She is an elected member of The Hastings Center and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is a founding board member of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning.

Career

Zoloth began her career as a neonatal nurse working in impoverished communities. She has a bachelor's degree in women's studies from UC Berkeley and a second bachelor’s in science (nursing) from the University of the State of New York, now Regent’s College. From 2000 to 2003 she was Professor of Social Ethics and Jewish Philosophy at San Francisco State University, from which she holds a master's degree in English. She received a second master’s degree in Jewish Studies, and a Ph.D in Social Ethics from the Graduate Theological Union, graduating in 1993, and holds a Health Care Ethics Consultant Certificate (HEC-C, 2024) From 2003 to 2017 she was jointly Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine and Professor of Religious Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. Since 2005 she has been an Affiliated Professor at the University of Haifa. She was appointed the Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School in July 2017, making her the first Jew to become the dean of a divinity school based at an American university. [4] Zoloth was succeeded by an interim dean, Executive Vice Provost David Nirenberg. She now is the Margaret E. Burton Professor and teaches and does research in the Divinity School; the College; and the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics at the Medical School, all at the University of Chicago.

Her work has received numerous awards for teaching and for research, including an honorary doctorate from American Jewish University; the Englehardt Award in Bioethics, and the 2024 Borsch- Rast Book Prize.

Related Research Articles

Elliot N. Dorff is an American Conservative rabbi. He is a Visiting Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Distinguished Professor of Jewish theology at the American Jewish University in California, author and a bio-ethicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Caplan</span> American bioethicist (born 1950)

Arthur L. Caplan is an American ethicist and professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Hastings Center</span> Non-profit organization in the USA

The Hastings Center is an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute and think tank based in Garrison, New York. It was instrumental in establishing the field of bioethics and is among the most prestigious bioethics and health policy institutes in the world.

James Franklin Childress is a philosopher and theologian whose scholarship addresses ethics, particularly biomedical ethics. Currently he is the John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is also Professor of Medical Education at this university and directs its Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. He holds a B.A. from Guilford College, a B.D. from Yale Divinity School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He was vice-chairman of the national Task Force on Organ Transplantation, and he has also served on the board of directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, the Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee, the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee, and several Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for NIH clinical trials. From 1996 to 2001, he served on the presidentially-appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

Albert R. Jonsen was one of the founders of the field of Bioethics. He was Emeritus Professor of Ethics in Medicine at the University of Washington, School of Medicine, where he was Chairman of the Department of Medical History and Ethics from 1987 to 1999. After retiring from UW, he returned to San Francisco, where he co-founded the Program in Medicine and Human Values at Sutter Health's California Pacific Medical Center in 2003.

Mordechai Halperin is an Israeli rabbi, physician and scientist. He is the chief officer of medical ethics for the Israeli Ministry of Health and director of the Falk Schlesinger Institute for Medical-Halachic Research in Jerusalem. He is also a member of the Bioethics Advisory Committee of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Christine K. Cassel is a leading expert in geriatric medicine, medical ethics and quality of care. She is planning dean of the new Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. Until March 2016, she was president and CEO of the National Quality Forum. Previously, Cassel served as president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the ABIM Foundation.

Dan W. Brock was an American philosopher, bioethicist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University and Brown University. He was the Frances Glessner Lee Professor Emeritus of Medical Ethics in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the former Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the Harvard Medical School, and former Director of the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health (PEH).

Wendy K. Mariner is an American academic who is the Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights in the Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights, at the Boston University School of Public Health. She is also a professor of law at Boston University School of Law and a professor of socio-medical sciences and community medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman Daniels</span> American philosopher and political theorist (born 1942)

Norman Daniels is an American political philosopher and philosopher of science, political theorist, ethicist, and bioethicist at Harvard University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before his career at Harvard, Daniels had built his career as a medical ethicist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and at Tufts University School of Medicine, also in Boston. He also developed the concept of accountability for reasonableness with James Sabin, an ethics framework used to challenge the healthcare resource allocation in the 1990s.

Stephen Garrard Post has served on the Board of the John Templeton Foundation (2008-2014), which focuses on virtue and public life. He is a researcher, opinion leader, medical school professor, and best-selling author who has taught at the University of Chicago Medical School, Fordham University-Marymount, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (1988-2008) and Stony Brook University School of Medicine (2008-). He is widely known for his research on the ways in which giving can enhance the health and happiness of the giver, how empathy and compassionate care contribute to patient outcomes, ethical issues in caring for people with dementia, medical professionalism and the virtues, and positive psychology in relation to health and well-being. Post is an elected member of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Royal Society of Medicine, London. He was selected nationally as the Public Member of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Composite Committee (2000-2005), and was reappointed for outstanding contributions.

Michael Alan Grodin is Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, where he has received the distinguished Faculty Career Award for Research and Scholarship, and 20 teaching awards, including the "Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching." He is also Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In addition, Dr. Grodin is the Director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, and a member of the faculty of the Division of Religious and Theological Studies. He has been on the faculty at Boston University for 35 years. He completed his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his postdoctoral and fellowship training at UCLA and Harvard University.

Ann M. Mongoven is an American philosophy professor and medical ethicist. She earned her Ph.D. in religious studies/ethics from the University of Virginia in 1996 and a M.P.H. from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2006. Mongoven taught courses at Indiana University/Bloomington before going on to teach at Michigan State University where she currently holds a dual appointment with the philosophy department and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. Mongoven is also a Michigan State University Lilly Teaching Fellow and was an ethics consultant for the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Jeffrey Paul Bishop is a philosopher, bioethicist, author and the Tenet Endowed Chair of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. The director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics, he is most widely recognized and cited for work in medical ethics as relating to death and dying in addition to contributions in the field of medical humanities. Bishop is a physician, holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Dallas and serves on the editorial boards of both the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and the Journal of Christian Bioethics for Oxford University Press.

Daniel Sulmasy is an American medical ethicist and former Franciscan friar. He has been Acting Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and on the faculty of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioetics. He is the inaugural Andre Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics, with co-appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Medicine at Georgetown.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francoise Baylis</span> Canadian bioethicist

Françoise Elvina BaylisFISC is a Canadian bioethicist whose work is at the intersection of applied ethics, health policy, and practice. The focus of her research is on issues of women's health and assisted reproductive technologies, but her research and publication record also extend to such topics as research involving humans, gene editing, novel genetic technologies, public health, the role of bioethics consultants, and neuroethics. Baylis' interest in the impact of bioethics on health and public policy as well as her commitment to citizen engagement]and participatory democracy sees her engage with print, radio, television, and other online publications.

Rosemarie "Rosie" Tong is an American feminist philosopher. The author of 1998's Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, an overview of the major traditions of feminist theory, she is the emeritus distinguished professor of health care ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Emilie Maureen Townes is an American Christian social ethicist and theologian. She was Dean, E. Rhodes, and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Townes was the first African-American woman to be elected president of the American Academy of Religion in 2008. She also served as the president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012–2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christine Mitchell</span> American filmmaker and bioethicist

Christine I. Mitchell is an American filmmaker and bioethicist and until her retirement in September 2022, the executive director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

Eric M. Meslin PhD is a Canadian-American philosopher-bioethicist and current President and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA).

References

  1. ↑ "Laurie Zoloth". Chicago: news.uchicago.edu. 28 March 2017. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
  2. ↑ Dembner, Spencer. "Divinity School Dean Zoloth to Step Down, Take New Role". The Chicago Maroon. Retrieved 8 November 2018.
  3. ↑ "A Conversation with the President". AAR. 1 May 2014. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
  4. ↑ Singer, Paul (2017-10-15). "University of Chicago makes history with first Jewish divinity school dean". USA Today. Retrieved 2017-12-11.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.