Lainie Ross

Lainie Friedman Ross is the Carolyn and Matthew Professor of Clinical Ethics at the University of Chicago where she is a practicing pediatrician, an associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and the codirector of the Institute of Translational Medicine.  She holds appointments in the departments of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery, and the College.  She received her undergraduate degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in1982 where she was influenced by the late Paul Ramsey to pursue controversial questions raised by children in medical research.  She obtained her medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1986 and her Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale University in 1996 where she worked with the late Jay Katz, whose work on vulnerable populations was very instrumental in her own research agenda.

During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, Dr. Ross will focus on writing a book that she has tentatively titled  “From Peapods to Whole Genomes:  Incidental Findings and Unintended Consequences in a Post-Mendelian World.”  This study has taken on a greater urgency as the cost and time required to perform whole genome sequencing has dropped from $3 billion dollars and fifteen years to less than $1,000 dollars and less than one week.

Dr. Ross has published over 200 articles in scholarly journals and has authored two books: Children, Families and Health Care Decision Making (1996) and Children in Research:  Access versus Protection (2006), both published by Oxford University Press.  She is currently writing Transplantation Ethics (2nd ed.) with Robert Veatch, which will be published by Georgetown University Press in 2014.  She is also committed to service.  On the national level, Dr. Ross has served on the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Bioethics and the Executive Committee of the Section on Bioethics, Secretary’s Advisory Committee for Human Research Protections (SACHRP), United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Ethics Committee, and American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) Social, Ethical and Legal Implications Committee. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Pediatrics, Journal of Clinical Ethics, and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.  She is a former Kellogg Fellow (class of XVI), a Hastings Fellow (2009), and the second recipient of the Patricia Price Browne Prize in Biomedical Ethics (2009).