M. THERESE LYSAUGHT, PhD

Therese’s professional journey is a story of building bridges between theology, social analysis, medicine, bioethics, and health care, while facilitating critical conversations, collegial collaborations, and constructive change.

On faculty at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics & Health Policy in the Stritch School of Medicine, she teaches courses at the intersection of ethics, social medicine, and mission leadership. In 2020, she was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life.

 …

Growing up in Chicago, Therese studied organic chemistry, writing, and religion at Hope College, theology at the University of Notre Dame, and received her doctorate in religion from the Duke University Divinity School, with minors in Religion and Culture and the History of Medicine.  At Duke, she was gifted with an extraordinary community of friendship and conversation cultivated by Stanley Hauerwas.

As a newly-minted theologian, she received a fellowship from the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH and spent a year in Dr. Jeff Murray’s Cooperative Human Linkage Lab at the University of Iowa, one of the major sequencing centers for the Human Genome Project.  She subsequently was appointed to the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) of the National Institutes of Health, an historic public advisory committee tasked with overseeing human genetic engineering and, at that time, the emerging field of gene therapy.

That same year, she embarked on an academic career as a professor of theological ethics that has now spanned over two decades at three Catholic universities. Along the way, she was introduced to Catholic health care via her work with the Catholic Health Association. She was privileged to spend a year with CHA as a Visiting Scholar, subsequently consulting with Catholic health systems across the US, Catholic universities, and a series of organizations engaged with Catholic higher ed.

She has been sustained along the way by the good people of the Ekklesia Project, a community of theologians, pastors, and congregations committed to fostering conversations about the Church. She found her own theological vision challenged and transformed by encountering the people of Haiti, El Salvador, and Guatemala through research projects in global health, and has been privileged to work with CMMB in developing ways to support their staff in Haiti, Peru, Kenya, Zambia, and South Sudan.

For more on Therese.