Dorothy Roberts, the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at Northwestern University, will deliver the 2012 Jessie Daniel Ames lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 7, at 4 p.m. in the Campus Center Ballrooms. The title of her lecture is “Race and the New Biocitizen.”

Roberts is a prolific scholar on legal and policy issues related to race, gender, genetics and reproduction. Her 2011 book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, explores race-based biotechnologies. Her two previous books are Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2003).

Roberts has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Hastings Center, and the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, among many others. She also is chair of the Board of Directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative and serves on the editorial board of Feminist Economics and on the Lexis/Nexis advisory board.