Margaret Foster Riley is Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law where she teaches in the areas of Bioethics, Food and Drug Law, Health Law, Animal Law and Public Health Law. She also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Riley has written and presented extensively about biomedical research, genetics, reproductive technologies, stem cell research, animal biotechnology, health disparities and chronic disease. She serves as chair of UVA’s Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee and as legal advisor to the Health Sciences Institutional Review Board, which is responsible for reviewing all human subject research at UVA involving medically invasive procedures.

Before coming to Virginia, Riley was an associate with Pepper Hamilton & Scheetz in Philadelphia, where she worked primarily in complex securities, commercial and mass tort litigation. Prior to that position, she was a litigation associate with Rogers & Wells in New York. Riley received her law degree from Columbia University and her bachelor of arts from Duke University and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

She is a graduate of Duke University and Columbia University Law School and was a litigation associate at Rogers & Wells in New York and Pepper Hamilton & Scheetz in Philadelphia prior to joining the faculty at Virginia in 1992. Her areas of interest include health institutions and reform, biomedical ethics and research, food and drug law, genomics, reproductive technologies, stem cell research, biotechnology, health disparities and chronic disease.