Professor Somerville holds professorships in both the Faculty of Law - where she holds the Samuel Gale Chair - and the Faculty of Medicine and was founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. She has been active in the worldwide development of bioethics and in the study of the wider legal and ethical aspects of medicine and science. Professor Somerville is widely published, has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences on ethical and legal aspects of science and society, and is a regular contributor to all forms of media. The title of her lecture is "The Ethical Canary."