Nicanor Austriaco

In 2011, Austriaco published a book titled Biomedicine and Beatitude: an Introduction to Catholic Bioethics. The book responds to questions raised in scientific and medical ethics from the perspective of the Catholic moral tradition that is grounded in a natural law and virtue ethic.

Since 2005, Austriaco has served on the faculty of Providence College. In the same year, he became an investigator at the Rhode Island Idea Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (RI-INBRE) Program. He is also the founding director of ThomisticEvolution.org, which seeks to promote a Catholic approach to understanding evolution in the light of faith. He is co-author of a book on Thomistic evolution.

In 1997, after a brief fellowship at the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research at the University College London, he entered the Order of Friars Preachers. He attended the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., where he earned his Master of Divinity degree and Licentiate in Sacred Theology. He completed his Doctorate in Sacred Theology at the University of Fribourg in 2015. Austriaco earned an M.B.A. degree from Providence College in 2020.

Austriaco attended the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a Bachelor of Science Engineering (B.S.E.), summa cum laude, in 1989. He went on to earn a PhD in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute pre-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Leonard Guarente. His doctoral research involved the characterization of the first aging genes in the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.