Professional Background
Lainie Ross, MD, PhD, joined the University of Rochester in January 2023 as Dean’s Professor and inaugural Chair, Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics and Director of the Paul M. Schyve MD Center for Bioethics with a secondary appointment in the Department of Pediatrics. Prior to her move, Dr. Ross was the Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Medical Ethics; Professor, Departments of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery and the College; Co-Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine, and Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. Clinically, Dr. Ross is a primary care pediatrician. She ran the clinical ethics consultation service at the University of Chicago for 20 years and the research ethics consultation for 25 years.
Dr. Ross earned her undergraduate degree from the School of Public and International Affairs from Princeton University (1982), her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (1986), and her doctorate in philosophy from Yale University (1996). She trained in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (1986-1988)and New York-Columbia Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital (1988-89).
Dr. Ross has lectured nationally and internationally on ethical and policy issues in organ transplantation, pediatrics, genetics, and human subjects protections. She has published five books and over 400 articles. She is currently writing a 6th book examining the ethical issues related to siblings in health care that received funding from the National Library of Medicine. Her five areas of expertise are: 1) pediatric ethics and policy; 2) genetic ethics and policy; 3) transplantation ethics and policy; 4) research ethics, publication ethics, and human subjects protection; and 5) gender and racial equity across the 3 academic pillars.
Dr. Ross has received funding from the Illinois Department of Public Health, the Greenwall Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Canadian Institute of Health Research. She received several teaching/mentorship awards at the University of Chicago, and has received national awards including: Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship Class XVI (1997-2000), the second recipient of the Patricia Price Brown Prize in Biomedical Ethics from the Oklahoma Health Sciences University (2009), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2014), and The American Academy of Pediatrics (Section on Bioethics) William G. Bartholome Award for Ethical Excellence (2015).