Ursula Goodenough is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She was educated at Radcliffe and Barnard Colleges and at Columbia and Harvard University, where she received a PhD in 1969. She was Assistant and Associate Professor of Biology at Harvard before moving to Washington University. She teaches a cell biology course for undergraduate biology majors and also co-teaches a course, The Epic of Evolution, with a physicist and a geologist, for non-science students. Her research focuses on the cell biology and (molecular) genetics of the sexual phase of the life cycle of the unicellular eukaryotic green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and, more recently, on the evolution of the genes governing mating-related traits. She wrote 3 editions of a widely adopted textbook, Genetics, and has served in numerous capacities in national biomedical arenas. She joined the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science in 1989 and has served the organization since then in various executive capacities. She has presented and published papers and seminars on science and religion in numerous arenas and wrote a book, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford University Press, 1998) that offers religious/spiritual perspectives of Nature, particularly biology at a molecular level.
