John H. Evans earned his B.A. from Macalester College and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He has been a Post-doctoral Fellow with the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at Yale, a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and has held a visiting professorial fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on religion, culture, politics and science. His first book, Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (2002, University of Chicago Press), won the Distinguished Book Award from the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. Playing God? offers an explanation for the emergence of the profession of bioethics in public bioethical debate, and an explanation for why these debates are structured as they are. His second book, tentatively titled Contested Reproduction: Genetic Technologies, Religion and Public Debate (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press), examines how ordinary religious people in the U.S. talk about reproductive genetic technologies. It also is a contribution to one of Evans’ other interests – polarization in public debates – in that it examines whether or not people will want to debate this issue in the future, or whether they will consider it to be a hopelessly polarized issue like the abortion debate. In addition to these books, Evans has written over 35 articles and book chapters on topics in religion, culture, politics and science. His new book in progress is tentatively titled Solving the Legitimacy Crisis in Public Bioethics: A Sociological View.