Faculty Scholars Program

Natalie Ram, JD

Class of 2021
  • Professor of Law
University of Maryland Carey School of Law
About
Scholar Project

Natalie Ram is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. Professor Ram is an expert on the intersection of genetic privacy and the law, with a particular interest in criminal justice and forensic science. Before joining Maryland Carey Law, Professor Ram clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and for Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court. Subsequently, she worked in the Appellate and Supreme Court Litigation Group at Morrison & Foerster in Washington, D.C. From 2014 to 2019, Professor Ram taught at the University of Baltimore School of Law. At the University of Baltimore, she was also associate director of the Center for Law and Medicine. Ram earned her JD at Yale Law School and AB in public and international affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. At Yale, Professor Ram was awarded the Margaret Gruter Prize for best paper on law and bioscience. Professor Ram’s recent publications include Genetic Privacy After Carpenter, 105 Va. L. Rev. 1357 (2019), Forensic Genealogy and the Power of Defaults, 37 Nature Biotech. 707 (2019) (with Jessica L. Roberts), and Genealogy Databases and the Future of Criminal Investigation, 360 Science 1078 (2018) (with Christi J. Guerrini and Amy L. McGuire). Professor Ram has appeared on CNN, national radio broadcasts Science Friday and Here & Now, and been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and BuzzFeed News. She has also written several op-eds for Slate.

For more information, visit: https://www.law.umaryland.edu/Directory/profile.asp?id=1222


Forensic Biobanking: Investigating Law Enforcement Use of Genetic Biobanks

Grant Cycle: 2017 - 2018

Little is known about how, and how frequently, criminal investigators gain access to genetic data held in clinical, research, or commercial biobanks, but there are documented examples of such access. Professor Ram’s project studies forensic use of genetic biobank materials and data through theoretical, analytical, and empirical lenses to determine when such use is problematic, where existing law leaves gaps in biobank privacy protections, and how those gaps may best be remedied by policy makers.

Share

Is this you? Let us know if you need to update any of this information.

BACK TO Faculty Scholars