Laurie Zoloth is Director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society and Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, and Professor of Religion and a member of the Jewish Studies faculty at Northwestern University, Weinberg College of Arts and Science. She is also the Director of Northwestern University’s Brady Scholars Program in Ethics and Leadership. The Center does research in bioethics at the Center for Genetic Medicine, the Center for Regenerative Medicine, The Oncofertility Consortium, the Women’s Health Research Institute, and the Institute for Nanotechnology. From 1995-2003, she was Professor of Ethics and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. In 2001, she was the President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities as well as serving on its founding board for two terms and receiving the Society’s award for Service to the Field in 2007. She was a two term member of the NASA National Advisory Council, the nation’s highest civilian advisory board for NASA, and received the NASA National Public Service Award in 2005. She currently serves on the NASA Planetary Protection Advisory Committee, and NASA’s Interagency National Animal Care and Use Committee. She was a founding board member and currently serves on the boards of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, The Society for Scriptural Reasoning, and the Society for Neuroethics. She is an executive board member of The Society for Women’s Health Research. Dr. Zoloth is the Chair of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Bioethics Advisory Board.
She is co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Section on Women and is a member of the Data Safety Monitoring Board of the NIH Asia AIDS Vaccine Trials. Professor Zoloth also served on the national advisory boards of the American Association of the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion; The Robert Wood Johnson’s Project on Excellence at the End of Life; The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Working Group on Human Germ-Line Interventions and on Stem Cell Research; the Ethics Section of the American Academy of Religion; the Western Jewish Studies Association; The Louis Finkelstein Institute for Jewish Social Ethics; The Park Ridge Center’s Project on Judaism and Bioethics. She is on the editorial boards of The American Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, The Journal of Clinical Ethics, and the American Journal of Bioethics.
Her book, “Health Care and The Ethics of Encounter”, on justice, health policy, and the ethics of community, was published in 1999. She is also co-editor of three books, Notes From a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics, with Dena Davis; Margin of Error: The Ethics of Mistakes in Medicine, with Susan Rubin; and The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate: Ethics, Religion, and Policy, with Karen LeBacqz and Suzanne Holland.
Her current research projects include work on the emerging issues in medical and research genetics, nanotechnology, neuroscience, and the ethical issues in stem cell research, and her research interest in distributive justice in health care continues. In 1999 she was invited to give testimony to the National Bioethics Advisory Board on Jewish philosophy and stem cell research. She was given a Northwestern University’s teaching award in 2005 and she was awarded three faculty recognition awards at SFSU, for teaching large classes, for research, and for community service. In 2005 she was awarded the Graduate Theological Union’s Alumni of the Year award for service to the field of Religion and Social Ethics. In 2000 she was awarded a NIH ELSI (Ethical Legal and Social Issues of the Human Genome) Grant to explore the ethical issues after the mapping of the human genome. In 2001, she was named principle investigator for the International Project on Judaism and Genetics, co-sponsored by the AAAS, and supported by the Haas Foundation and the Greenwall Fund.