Thomas W. Merrill is a political theorist in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC. He was a senior research analyst at the President's Council on Bioethics and is the co-editor of Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver: Honoring the Work of Leon R. Kass (with Yuval Levin and Adam Schulman, 2010) and Human Dignity and Bioethics (with Edmind D. Pellegrino and Adam Schulman, 2009). He has held fellowships from Princeton University, New Jersey, Harvard University, Massachusetts, and the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC.