Alta Charo, J.D.

Alta Charo, J.D. is the Knowles Professor Emerita of Law & Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, where for over 30 years she has taught classes on biotechnology policy, food and drug law, public health law and bioethics. In 2020-2021 Alta was the David A. Hamburg Inaugural Fellow at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, working in its global biosecurity program. She is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the National Academy of Medicine. She was a member of Pres. Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, worked as a policy analyst at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the US Agency for International Development, and also served as a senior policy advisor in the Office of the Commissioner at the FDA, focusing on regulatory approaches to emerging technologies. At the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine she co-chaired the committees on guidelines for embryonic stem cell research (2005-2010) and governance of human genome editing (2015-2017), co-founded the forum on regenerative medicine, served on its committee on science technology and law, and co-chaired its standing committee on “emerging science, technology and innovation.” She was also a member of the World Health Organization’s expert advisory committee on global governance of genome editing, and a member of the organizing committee for the 2022 international summit on genome editing. At present, she is a member of the Biological Sciences and Technology group at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the DoD, where she recently co-chaired a study on autonomous global biosurveillance.