Harriet A. Washington is a science writer, editor, and ethicist who is the author of Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research (2021, Columbia Global Reports); and A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. She has been Writing Fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University, and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health graduates, and won the 2020 Mailman School Of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as the 2020-21Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award.