Contemporary Issues in Bioethics

Tom Beauchamp is Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He received graduate degrees from Yale University (Divinity) and Johns Hopkins University, where he received his Ph.D. in in philosophy 1970. He then joined the faculty of the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University, and in the mid-70s accepted a joint appointment at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. In 1976, he joined the staff of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, where he wrote the bulk of The Belmont Report (1978). Dr. Beauchamp's research interests are in Hume and the history of modern philosophy and practical ethics, especially biomedical ethics and business ethics.

LeRoy Walters is the Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. He received his BA from a small Pennsylvania liberal-arts college, Messiah College, and a B.D. degree at the Associated Mennonite Seminaries. He then studied for two years in Germany, one year at the University of Heidelberg and one year at the Free University of Berlin. Walters returned to the United States and received his PhD in Christian ethics from Yale University. In 1971, Walters joined the newly-established Kennedy Institute of Ethics as the first faculty member appointed to a multi-year term. He served as director of the Institute from 1996-2000. His interests are in the ethical issues in human genetics, and since 2003 Dr. Walters has devoted major attention to Holocaust Studies and to the "euthanasia" program initiated in 1939 under National Socialism.

Jeffrey Kahn is Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins' Berman Institute of Bioethics, and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health. He received his undergraduate degree from UCLA, and graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins (MPH) and Georgetown University, where he received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1989. He has held faculty positions in the medical schools at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota, where he was professor and director in the Center for Bioethics from 1996-2011; he was visiting professor at the University of Zurich in 2009. Dr Kahn has served as staff or a member of a number of national commissions related to bioethics, including chairing the IOM Committee on the Necessity of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 2011. Dr. Kahn's research interest includes ethics of leading-edge research, ethics and genetics, and ethics and public health.

Anna Mastroianni is Professor of Law at the University of Washington's School of Law and Institute for Public Health Genetics. She has additional faculty appointments in the UW Department of Health Services, School of Public Health and in the Department of Bioethics & Humanities and the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine. Professor Mastroianni received her B.A., B.S., and J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and her M.P.H. from the University of Washington. She has worked in a number of legal and governmental policy positions in Washington D.C., including Associate Director of President Bill Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments and Study Director of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences. Previously, she worked in the private practice of law in Washington, D.C.. She has served on a number of government and non-government advisory bodies, including the National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee. She has been nationally recognized for her contributions to health policy, law, and bioethics as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Mastroianni's research interests are in the intersections of law, bioethics, public health and medicine, with a special emphasis on the legal and ethical challenges of research with human subjects and assisted reproductive technologies.