Janet Radcliffe Richards is reader in bioethics at University College London, and director of its Centre for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine. She holds degrees in philosophy from the universities of Keele, Calgary, and Oxford, and was formerly a member of the Department of Philosophy at the Open University, where she specialised in philosophy of science, ethics, and applied philosophy.

Her most important publications are THE SCEPTICAL FEMINIST: A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY, Routledge 1980 and Penguin 1982, and HUMAN NATURE AFTER DARWIN, Routledge 2000. She has published a wide range of academic articles on feminism, equality, and, more recently, biomedical ethics. She was also the author of a range of Open University texts on philosophy of science, practical reasoning in the context of nuclear weapons, introductory logic, introductory philosophy, problems of equality and discrimination, and the implications of Darwinian theory. She is currently working on a book on discrimination for OUP.

She is a frequent broadcaster on controversial philosophical, moral and scientific issues.