Professor of Law and Bioethics
E-mail: pnossorio@wisc.edu
Telephone: (608)263-4387
Office: Room 9103, Law School
Education:
Ph.D., Stanford University (Microbiology and Immunology)
J.D., University of California-Berkeley (Boalt Hall)
Teaching Areas:
Intellectual Property
Law & Medicine
Patent Law
Torts
Recently Taught Courses
715 Torts
751 Patent Law
906 Law, Science & Biotechnology
Biography
Dr. Ossorio is Associate Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Program Faculty in the Graduate Program in Population Health at the UW. Prior to taking her position at UW, she was Director of the Genetics Section at the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association, and taught as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School.
Dr. Ossorio received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology in 1990 from Stanford University. She went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship in cell biology at Yale University School of Medicine. Throughout the early 1990’s Dr. Ossorio also worked as a consultant for the federal program on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of the Human Genome Project, and in 1994 she took a full time position with the Department of Energy’s ELSI program. In 1993 she served on the Ethics Working Group for President Clinton’s Health Care Reform Task Force.
Dr. Ossorio received her JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1997. While at Boalt she was elected to the legal honor society Order of the Coif and received several awards for outstanding legal scholarship.
Dr. Ossorio is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS), a member of the editorial board of the American Journal of Bioethics, chair of an NHGRI advisory group on ethical issues in large scale sequencing, and a member of UW’s institutional review board for health sciences research. She is a past member of AAAS’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, a past member of the National Cancer Policy Board (Institute of Medicine), and has been a member or chair of several working groups on genetics and ethics.
Recently Published Articles:
- Ossorio, P.N. (in press) About Face: Forensic Genetic Profiling for Race and Visible Traits, J. Law, Medicine & Ethics.
- Ossorio, P.N. & Duster, T. (2005) Race and Genetics: Controversies in Biomedical, Behavioral, and Forensic Sciences, American Psychologist, 60(1): 115 - 128.
- Ossorio, P.N. (2005) Race, Genetic Variation, and the Haplotype Mapping Project, 41 Louisiana Law Rev. 131.
- Ossorio, P.N. (2004) Societal and Ethical Issues in Pharmacogenomics, in Pharmacogenomics: Applications to Patient Care, Scheife, RT. ed. (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications): 399-440.
- Ossorio, P.N. (2003) Inheritable Genetic Modifications: Do We Owe Them To Our Children?, in Designing Our Descendants, M. Frankel & A. Chapman, eds., (Baltimore, London, Johns Hopkins University Press): 252-271.
