Dr. Sloan is professor emeritus in the Program of Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame’s “Great Books” department and in the graduate program in history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame. Dr. Sloan has also been active as a fellow in the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values since its founding in 1985 and served as the director of the graduate Harvard Premedical Society Program and Reilly Center from 1994 to 1999. He is a fellow and past chair of Section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has held national office twice on the governing council of the History of Science Society. From 2002 to 2009, he served as the president of the Association for Core Texts and Courses (www.coretexts.org), an international organization dedicated to advancement of general liberal education through the study of classic texts. He has also served as a lay advisor to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Science and Human Values from 1998 to 2006.
His research focuses on the history and philosophy of life science from the early modern period to contemporary molecular biology. He was the primary conference organizer, editor, and contributor to Controlling Our Destinies: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical and Theological Implications of the Human Genome Project (2002) and has in press with the University of Chicago the co-authored Creating a Physical Biology: The Three-Man Paper and Early Molecular Biology (2012). His current project is a multi-year study, funded by the National Science Foundation, on the conception of life in modern biophysics and its implication for bioethical questions. He is actively involved in the Notre Dame Initiative for Adult and Alternative Stem Cell Research (www.adultstemcell.nd.edu), an interdisciplinary working group devoted to advancing ethically sound stem cell research and was co-director of the 2011 Inaugural Summer Workshop on Adult and Non-Embryonic Stem Cell Research.