Ellen Wright Clayton, MD, JD

Ellen Wright Clayton, MD, JD

Ellen Wright Clayton, MD, JD, received her bachelor's degree from Duke, her master's degree from Stanford, her law degree from Yale and her medical degree from Harvard. A member of the Vanderbilt faculty since 1988, she is currently the Rosalind E. Franklin Professor of Genetics and Health Policy and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is also a professor of pediatrics (and a practicing general pediatrician) and a professor of law. At Vanderbilt, she created the Law Emphasis Program and teaches Patient, Profession and Society in the medical school and the interdisciplinary course in bioethics and law in four schools of the university.

She has been interested in issues surrounding the ethical, legal and social implications of advances in genetics and genomics for many years as both a scholar and a policymaker. She has served on Tennessee's Genetics Advisory Council since the early 1990s and has participated in numerous policy and academic groups that have considered newborn screening. She has been involved with the Human Genome Project in the United States, most recently serving as co-chair of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Working Group of the International Haplotype Mapping Project. She has been involved in addressing other ethical issues in pediatrics, having served on the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Bioethics. Recently elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine, she has served on several IOM committees, including those on Genomics and the Public's Health in the 21st Century; Assessing Interactions Among Social, Behavioral and Genetic Factors of Health; and evaluating the National Children's Study. She is currently chairing a committee to evaluate Title X family planning. She is also directing three empirical research projects investigating the impact of advances of genetic knowledge on patients.