Biography
Professor Maura Ryan, PhD is the John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, and vice president and associate provost for faculty affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from St. Bonaventure University, a master’s in theology from Boston College, and both a master’s and a doctorate in religious studies from Yale University. She is a fellow of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Kellogg Institute and the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. She became a Senior Research Associate of the Von Hügel Institute at St Edmund's College in 2024.
Professor Ryan joined Notre Dame’s Department of Theology in 1993 after having been on the faculty at the College of the Holy Cross, the University of New Haven, and Albertus Magnus College and a visiting scholar in the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from St. Bonaventure University, a master’s in theology from Boston College, and both a master’s and a doctorate in religious studies from Yale University. She received a Henry Luce III Fellowship from the Association of Theological Schools in 2007–08 and served on the editorial board of The Cambridge Dictionary of Bioethics in 2010. She is the recipient of a Lilly Teaching Fellowship and won a Kaneb Teaching Award from Notre Dame in 2001.
Research
Bioethics and health policy, fundamental moral theology, and the intersections of health, development and human rights.
Publications
Maura A. Ryan is the author of Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction: The Cost of Longing, and co-edited The Challenge of Global Stewardship: Roman Catholic Responses with fellow Notre Dame theologian Todd Whitmore. She was also the co-editor of A Just & True Love: Feminism at the Frontiers of Theological Ethics.