Lader Lecture

Dov Fox, DPhil, JD, LLM, is the Herzog Research Professor of Law, and the Director of the Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics at the University of San Diego. An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Fox specializes in constitutional history, criminal law, and torts. His books include The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars(Harvard University Press, 2025) and Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law(Oxford University Press, 2019). Professor Fox is the author of more than 80 scholarly articles in leading journals of law (e.g., Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal), science (e.g., Nature, Science), medicine (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association), and public health (e.g., Foreign Affairs, American Journal of Public Health). His research is frequently discussed in popular magazines (e.g., Newsweek, Economist) and radio outlets (e.g., CNN, NPR). Fox also publishes opinion essays (e.g., New York Times, Wall Street Journal) and provides on-air analysis (e.g., Today Show, Good Morning America).

Vardit Ravitsky, PhD is President and CEO of The Hastings Center, an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research center that is among the most influential bioethics and health policy institutes in the world. She is a part-time Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and past Full Professor at the Bioethics Program, School of Public Health, University of Montreal. She is Past President of the International Association of Bioethics and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Ravitsky holds a BA from the Sorbonne University in Paris, an MA from the University of New Mexico in the US, and a PhD from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Previously, she was Fellow at the Department of Bioethics at the NIH and faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. Ravitsky has published over 200 articles and commentaries on bioethical issues and has given over 300 talks world-wide and over 400 media interviews. Her research focuses on the ethics of genomics and reproduction, as well as the use of AI in health. She is a Principal Investigator on two Bridge2AI research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health that expand the use of AI in biomedical and behavioral research. She serves on the steering committee of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) to develop an Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct (AICC).

Monica McLemore, PhD, MPH, RN, is a Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing, and Interim Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Washington, School of Nursing. This lecture was part of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Grand Rounds, and was not open to the public.

Linda Greenhouse, MSL, is a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where she has taught since 2009. For the preceding thirty years, she was the New York Times Supreme Court correspondent and earned a number of major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for her coverage of the Court. She has written widely about the law and politics of abortion. Her New York Times Magazine article, “Constitutional Question: Is There a Right to Abortion?”, published in January 1970, was one of the first articles for a general readership about the emerging legal framework for the abortion debate. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College, Harvard, and earned a Master of Studies in Law Degree from Yale Law School. She has been a member of several nonprofit boards, including the Harvard Board of Overseers (2009-2015) and currently serves as president of the American Philosophical Society, the first woman to hold that position since the society’s founding by Benjamin Franklin in 1943.