Professor Laurie Zoloth holds the Margaret E. Burton Chair of Religion and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she has served as Dean of the Divinity School and Senior Advisor to the Provost on Social Ethics. She has a distinguished career as a bioethicist and scholar of Jewish ethics, writing or editing 10 books, and over 350 articles. She was both President of the American Academy of Religion and President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, receiving its Distinguished Service Award in 2007. She was a co-founder of the Society for Jewish Ethics and founding chair of the HHMI Bioethics Board. She served on the NASA National Advisory Council, for which she received the NASA National Public Service Award and where she currently serves on the NASA Bioethics Board. She has served as an ethicist for the CDC and the NIH, including service on the Recombinant DNA Advisory Board.
Her honors include the Graduate Theological Union’s alumna of the year, an honorary doctorate from the American Jewish University, the Engelhardt Award in Bioethics and the Borsch-Rast Book Award in Religion. She is an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her most recent books are Second Texts and Second Opinions: Essays toward a Jewish Bioethics and Ethics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought, both from Oxford University Press, and May We Make the World?: Gene Drives, Malaria, and the Future of Nature, from MIT.