The Rhode Island Benedictine Portsmouth Abbey School welcomed Dominican Father Nicanor Austriaco to deliver the Dom Luke Childs Lecture on October 15, 2012. He is an Associate Professor of Biology at Providence College. Father's address was titled, "What Can Human Genomics Tell Us About Adam and Eve?"
Watch the presentation, it is very good and informative.
The Dom Luke Childs Lecture honors the popular Benedictine monk who taught at Portsmouth and died unexpectedly in 1976. The Lecture topics cover a wide range of intellectual and culture pursuits.
About the presenter
A friar in the Order of Preachers, known as the Dominicans, Father Nic earned a Bachelor's of Science Degree in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989; earned a Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; he was a fellow of the International Human Frontier Science Program at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University College London in the United Kingdom.
Austriaco completed his early theological education at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., in 2003 and ordained to the priesthood a year later.
In 2005, he earned his Pontifical License in Sacred Theology (S.T.L.) for a thesis in moral theology entitled, Life and Death from the Systems Perspective: A Thomistic Bioethics for a Post-Genomic Age, also at the Dominican House of Studies. He is currently pursuing a Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology (S.T.D) from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Father Nic is an under-achiever.
Currently, Father Austriaco serves as an Associate Professor of Biology and an Instructor of Theology at Providence College. Additionally, he is an Investigator of the Rhode Island-INBRE Program funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a scientific advisor at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, as well as an ethics consultant for St. Joseph Health Services of Rhode Island.
Finally, Father Austriaco's first book, Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (CUA Press) was published at the end of 2011.
Father Austriaco was a guest speaker at Portsmouth Institute 2012.
Several years ago Father Nicanor published a very accessible booklet on the promise of stem cells for me when I was at the Catholic Information Services at the Knights of Columbus several years ago.
The booklet: N. Austriaco Understanding Stem Cell Research.pdf
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