Leslie Meltzer Henry joined the faculty at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in 2008 and has a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. She teaches constitutional law, biomedical research regulation and ethics, public health law and ethics, bioethics, and reproductive justice.

Professor Henry is nationally recognized for her expertise in assessing, navigating, and advising on a range of ethical and legal issues that arise at the intersection of medicine, public health, and public policy.  Her scholarly work primarily focuses on aspects of biomedical research regulation and practice that have implications for, and are implicated by, social justice and public health. She has been an investigator on National Institutes of Health (NIH) and internationally funded grants, including most recently, a project examining the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of the increasingly blurred boundaries between infectious disease and genetics, and a separate project involving the use of HIV phylogenetics in clinical care and public health. Professor Henry previously worked on projects aimed at developing ethically and legally acceptable strategies for including pregnant people in clinical research during public health emergencies. She is a core member of the Center for Bridging Infectious Disease, Genomics, and Society (BRIDGES) and the Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE).

Professor Henry is an associate editor of the Oxford Handbook for Public Health Ethics (OUP, 2016), and a contributor to both the Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics (OUP, 2020) and the Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics (OUP, 2008). Her scholarship has been published in the nation’s leading peer-review medical journals (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine; JAMA; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; AIDS; Obstetrics & Gynecology; BMC Reproductive Health; Ethics & Human Research; Hastings Center Report) and law reviews (e.g., University of Pennsylvania Law Review; Michigan Law Review; Georgetown Law Journal; Journal of Law and the Biosciences; Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics; Journal of Health Care Law & Policy).

Professor Henry has served in an advisory capacity to a variety of federal, state, and local agencies and commissions—including the Department of Defense (DoD), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (OWH), the Trans-NIH Bioethics Advisory Committee, and the Maryland State Senate—to identify limits, as well as areas of flexibility, in regulations related to the inclusion of special populations in research.  She has been quoted in media outlets including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, NPR, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, and the Baltimore Sun.