Ann Cook is director of the National Rural Bioethics Project, based at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she is a professor of psychology. The project helps address ethics issues in rural communities.

John Burdick, Syracuse University professor and anthropology chair, is the author of Legacies of Liberation: The Progressive Catholic Church in Brazil (Ashgate Publishing, 2004). He says the emphasis in liberation theology has shifted from the poor to those marginalized by race, ethnicity or gender – though not yet sexuality. Contact , .

Abdulaziz A. Sachedina is a coordinator of the Islamic bioethics group of the International Association of Bioethics and is a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He contributed the entry on bioethics for The Oxford Dictionary of Islam.

Gilbert Meilaender is a senior research professor at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., and a fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. He was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2002 to 2009.

Sister Carol Taylor is former director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University. She also is a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a professor of nursing at Georgetown. Her background is in philosophy, bioethics and nursing. She is experienced in caring for chronically and critically ill patients and their families.

Otto Maduro, professor of Christianity at Drew University in Madison, N.J., has written from a sociological perspective about the liberating option for the oppressed in Latin American Catholicism and on the relations between Marxism and religion.

Kevin E. Lofton is president and CEO at the Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives. CHI is operated by a religious-lay partnership. It is one of the largest Catholic health systems firm in the country, with hospitals; long-term care, assisted and independent living and residential facilities; and community-based health organizations in 16 states.

Arthur Caplan is a professor of bioethics and director of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s school of medicine. He co-edited Assisted Suicide: Finding Common Ground.

Tom Mayo is director of the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He has expertise in ethical questions involving Medicare fraud and abuse, organ transplantation, tax-exempt status of health care organizations and, particularly, end-of-life decision-making and advance directives.