Ira Carmen

Ira Carmen is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the department as an Assistant Professor in 1968 and served for 41 years until his retirement in 2009. Renowned for his commitment to undergraduate education, Carmen received the Department of Political Science's Clarence A. Berdahl Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching on four occasions: 1980, 1987, 1990, and 2006.

Carmen’s academic interests encompass the intersection of political science and biological sciences, with a focus on biopolitics, constitutional law, the U.S. Supreme Court, the judicial process, and governmental policymaking regarding genetic experimentation and human genomics. Affiliated with the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology, he participated in research teams exploring sociogenomics and stem cell research. In 2008, he co-organized a pioneering two-day conference titled “Politics and Biology” at the university, described as the first of its kind to examine these intersections. His key publications include “Movies, Censorship, and the Law” (1966, University of Michigan Press), which examines judicial decisions on film censorship; “Cloning and the Constitution: An Inquiry into Governmental Policymaking and Genetic Experimentation” (1985, University of Wisconsin Press); and “Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of Human Genomics” (2004, University of Wisconsin Press), which fuses experimental biological research with political science to explore human genomics. Carmen also served from 1990 to 1994 on the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, he chaired Ph.D. dissertations, such as “Gatekeeping and the Judicial Processing of Scientific Information” (2006), and contributed to university forums on stem cells, elections, and post-9/11 legacies.

Professional Email: icarmen@illinois.edu