Ana Rosa Barahona Echeverria

Professor of History of Science at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

At UNAM, Echeverria founded the area of ​​Social Studies of Science and Technology, and is also the author of Para Entender A Darwin, as well as numerous articles and publications. Her primary areas of research include History of Science in Mexico during the Cold War, Genetics, Bioethics & Biodiversity, and Historical Epistemology. Dr. Echeverria also served as an adviser of the UN for the National Consultation on the Millennium Development Goals, which addressed pressing global issues including poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women.

Ruha Benjamin

Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. 

Professor Benjamin is the founder of the JUST DATA Lab and the author of two books, People’s Science (Stanford) and Race After Technology (Polity).  She is also editor of Captivating Technology (Duke). Her work primarily focuses on the relationship between innovation and equity, as expressed in her latest book, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013).

Catherine Bliss

Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California San Francisco.

Her research explores the sociology of race, gender and sexuality in science, medicine, and society. Bliss's award winning book Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Stanford 2012) examines how genomics became today’s new science of race. She has since published Social by Nature: The Promise and Peril of Sociogenomics (Stanford 2018) and Go Edit Yourself: Programming People With DNA Science.

Rachel Bronson

President and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Bronson oversees the Bulletin’s publishing programs, management of the Doomsday Clock, and a growing set of activities around nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies. Before joining the Bulletin, Bronson served as the vice president of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, and The Chicago Tribune. She has appeared as a commentator on numerous radio and television outlets.

Yangyang Cheng

Postdoctoral Research Associate at Cornell University.

Cheng is a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In 2018, she became an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermilab. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 2015, and her Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Science and Technology of China's School for the Gifted Young. Her writings have appeared in Foreign Policy, MIT Technology Review, ChinaFile, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and other publications.

Nathaniel Comfort

Professor at the Institute on the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Comfort is the author of a 2001 biography of Barbara McClintock, The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control. His 2012 book, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine, examines the history of human and medical genetics and its relationship to the United States’ eugenics movement. During his time as third Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology in the John W. Kluge Center, Comfort used the collections to examine the history of the genomic revolution in origin-of-life research.

Dalton Conley

Professor of Sociology at Henry Putnam University.

Conley is a faculty affiliate at the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. Conley’s scholarship has dealt with the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic and health status from parents to children, including the study of genetics as a driver of both social mobility and reproduction. Conley was recently named as a 2019 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his socially distinguished work. His books include Being Black, Living in the Red; The Starting Gate; Honky; The Pecking Order; You May Ask Yourself; Elsewhere, USA; Parentology; and The Genome Factor.

Marcy Darnovsky

Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society.

Darnovsky is an American policy advocate and author who has extensively spoken and written on the politics of human biotechnology, focusing on their feminist, social justice, human rights, health equity, and public-interest implications. She works on encouraging responsible uses and effective societal governance of reproductive and genetic technologies, notably CRISPR, to limit manipulation of the human germline. She is also co-editor, along with Osagie K Obasogie, of a newly published book, Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics (2018).

Lennard Davis

Professor of English and Applied Health Sciences at UIC.

Internationally regarded as an American specialist in disability studies, Davis won the 1996 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights’ annual award for his book, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso, 1995). He is also director of Project Biocultures, a think-tank devoted to studying the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere. His current interests include disability-related issues; literary and cultural theory; genetics, race, identity; and biocultural issues.

Joshua Fairbank

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.

Fairbank is the President of Orchard Capital Management as well as the co-founder and investment team lead at Orchard Ventures, a biotech VC fund. Faribank also runs Nymirum as its co-founder and executive chairman. Nymirum is a computational genetics firm that harnesses AI and big data to work on multiple unsolved diseases including cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, and infectious diseases. He is a joint inventor of one of Nymirum's biophysics patents with decades of experience as both an investor and an entrepreneur.

Frances Flinter

Emeritus Professor of Clinical Genetics at King’s College London.

Flinter is also a Caldicott Guardian at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and a former member of the Human Genetics Commission. Her particular interests include the genetics of inherited renal disease and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). As the consultant geneticist on the Guy’s PGD team–now the largest and most successful in the UK–Flinter contributed to the healthy births of more than 350 babies as a result of this program. Her articles include “Use and misuse of preimplantation genetic diagnosis” (BMJ, 2007) and “Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis” (Nature Reviews: Genetics, 2002).

Isabel Gabel

Research Fellow in Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Genetics and Genomics at UPenn.

From 2015-2018, Gabel was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine and the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Her book, The Living Past: Biology and History in Midcentury France, examines how humanists were reimagining socio-political possibilities through the framework of radical transformations in the life sciences in the middle of the twentieth century, especially evolutionary theory, embryology, and genetics. Her work has appeared in Perspectives on Europe and History of the Human Sciences.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University.

Thomson is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, teacher, and humanities scholar. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities to bring forward disability access, inclusion, and identity to a broad range of institutions and communities. She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the Disability Series by the New York Times (Liveright 2019) and the author of Staring: How We Look (Oxford 2009), along with numerous other books. Her current project is Embracing Our Humanity: A Bioethics of Disability and Health.

Christopher Gyngell

Research Fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute at the University of Melbourne.

Gyngell was previously a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he led a project titled "Selecting, Creating and Modifying Embryos", which investigated the ethical and legal implications of the gene editing technique CRISPR. He is also the author of articles such as “Gene editing and the health of future generations” as well as “Drugs, genes and screens: The ethics of preventing and treating spinal muscular atrophy”. His research interests lie primarily in the ethical implications of biotechnology and the philosophy of health and disease

Hille Haker

Richard McCormick, S. J., Chair of Moral Theology at Loyola University Chicago.

Prior to joining the faculty at Loyola, Haker was Chair of Moral Theology and Social Ethics at Frankfurt University (2005 to 2009), Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Harvard Divinity School (2003 to 2005), and Heisenberg Research Scholar (2002–2003). Dr. Haker’s research focuses on the foundations of ethics, moral identity, literary and narrative ethics, Christian ethics as critical social ethics, bioethics, and feminist ethics. Former President of Societas Ethica, European Society for Research in Ethics, she is the author of Recognition and Responsibility: Critical Theory and Christian Ethics and the editor of Values in Bioethics and Medizinische Ethik in der Klinikseelsorge/Medical Ethics in Health Care Chaplaincy.

Evelynn Hammonds

Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard.

Hammonds is an American feminist and scholar, as well as former Dean of Harvard College. She is currently completing a history of biological, medical, and anthropological uses of racial concepts entitled, The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States, 1850–1990. Her research interests and past publications cover topics spanning the analysis of gender and race in science and medicine to the history of African American feminism, African American women, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Terence Keel

Associate Professor in the Dept. of African American Studies and the Institute for Society & Genetics at UCLA.

Keel’s first book, Divine Variations, documents the intellectual legacy shared between modern scientific racism and religion in Europe and America.  He is also the recipient of the Harold J. Plous Award, UC Santa Barbara, 2017. Keel has written widely about American biomedical science, religion, law, and modern thought and his latest project examines shifting conceptions of society and human identity in the minds of American biologists, New Left critics, and Neoconservatives during the “Culture Wars.”

Dan Kevles

Stanley Woodward Professor Emeritus of History, History of Medicine & American Studies at Yale University and Adjunct Professor of Yale Law School.

Kevles’s research interests include the history of physics, biology, scientific fraud and misconduct, plant and animal breeding, biotechnology, intellectual property, and science, arms, and the state. In 2001, Kevles received the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, awarded for "a lifetime of scholarly achievement". Recently, he co-edited the book, Living Properties: Making Knowledge and Controlling Ownership in the History of Biology. Of his seven books, The Baltimore Case was awarded the History of Science Society’s Watson Davis Prize and In the Name of Eugenics was a runner up for the National Book Award (called the American Book Award at the time) in Non-Fiction.

Edward Larson

Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair of Law and Professor of History at Pepperdine University.

Larson is an American historian and legal scholar, as well as Pulitzer Prize Winner for Summer of the Gods. He is the author of many books, including Sex, Race, and Science:  Eugenics in the Deep South. As a panelist on the National Institutes of Health's Study Section for Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues of the Human Genome Project, Larson is interviewed frequently for broadcast, print, cable, and internet media, including The Daily Show, The Today Show, and multiple appearances on PSB, BBC, the History Channel, C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News, MNBC, and NPR.

Tim Leonard

Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Princeton University.

As a historian of economics, Leonard specializes in the American Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He has twice been awarded the Richard D. Quandt Prize for outstanding teaching at Princeton. Along with writing numerous articles and appearing in the PBS program, The American Experience, he recently published a widely acclaimed book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era.

Peggy Mason

Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago.

After a 25-year focus on the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation, Mason’s laboratory now focuses on the biological and neurobiological basis of empathy, helping, and pro-social behavior. Using her nearly 15 years of experience teaching medical students, Mason wrote a single-author textbook designed for medical students, Medical Neurobiology (Oxford University Press 2011). She is now offering a detailed on-line course available to the public, Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life.

Alexandra Minna Stern

Professor in History, Women's Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan.

Stern is the Associate Dean of the Humanities and Director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which explores patterns and experiences of eugenics and sterilization in the 20th century using mixed methods from the social sciences, humanities, and public health. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2015) and her latest project, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate (2019), applies the lenses of historical analysis, feminist studies, and critical race studies to deconstructing the core ideas of the alt-right and white nationalism.

Osagie K. Obasogie

Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Obasogie’s research and writing is on bioethics, with a focus on the social, ethical, and legal implications of new reproductive and genetic technologies.  His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford University Press) was awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize by the Law and Society Association. Obasogie’s second book, Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics (co-edited with Marcy Darnovsky, University of California Press) is an edited volume that examines the past, present, and future of bioethics.

Funmi Olopade

Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics at the University of Chicago.

Olopade is the director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics & Global Health at the University of Chicago Medicine. She is an expert in cancer risk assessment and individualized treatment for the most aggressive forms of breast cancer, having developed novel management strategies based on an understanding of the altered genes in individual patients. Olopade has received honorary degrees from six universities and a 2005 MacArthur Fellowship for “translating findings on the molecular genetics of breast cancer in African and African-American women into innovative clinical practices in the United States and abroad.”

Alexander Olson

Associate Professor of History at the Mahurin Honors College at Western Kentucky University.

Olson’s fields of interest are U.S. History, American Studies, the North American West, Indigenous Studies, and Biopolitics. He is a recipient of the 2018 ACLS Project Development Grant for his project, Blood and Soil Bohemianism: Creativity and Eugenics, 1860-1940, which investigates the history of eugenics in twentieth-century California as well as the vocabularies, practices, and identity scripts through which Americans understood the nature of learning and discovery before the emergence of creativity discourse.

Diane B. Paul

Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

In addition to her standing as a professor emerita, Paul is a Research Associate in Population Genetics for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Her research has principally focused on the histories of evolution and genetics, especially as they relate to eugenics and the nature-nurture debate. She is the author of Controlling Human Heredity (1995), The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, BiomedicineThe Nature-Nurture Debate (1998), and most recently, the edited volume, Eugenics at the Edges of Empire (2018).

Dawn Shapiro

Director, Producer and Writer. 

Shapiro began her journalism career working for the award winning news magazine program, CBS News Sunday Morning. Shapiro has worked as a Producer, Associate Producer, Writer, Online Editor/Writer for Tribune Broadcasting, CNBC, MSNBC, Dateline NBC and Chicago Public Radio. Her latest documentary, The State of Eugenics (2016), covers the true story of survival, deception and the battle for justice in North Carolina for thousands who were sterilized against their will between 1933 and 1974. Other documentaries of hers include Inside the Handy Writers’ Colony (2008) and The Edge of Joy (2010). 

Carl Zimmer

Author and Science Journalist.

Zimmer is an award-winning New York Times columnist and the decorated author of thirteen books about science, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea (2001) and Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery Of The Brain And How It Changed The World (2005). His newest book is She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (2018), chosen as a notable book of the year by the NYT Book Review and named as best science book of 2018 by The Guardian. He is a popular speaker at universities and medical schools, and a frequent on radio programs such as Radiolab and This American Life.

Laurie Zoloth

Margaret E. Burton Professor of Religion and Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

In addition to her profesiorial titles, Zoloth is also the Senior Advisor to the Provost for Programs on Social Ethics at the university. Zoloth’s research explores religion and ethics, drawing from sources ranging from Biblical and Talmudic texts to postmodern Jewish philosophy. Her scholarship spans the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, synthetic biology, social justice in health care, and how science and medicine are taught. She is the author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice and co-editor of five books, including Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics and Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought.