Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame and Adjunct Professor of Medical Genetics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Born on June 5, 1933, in Cleveland, Ohio; married Eileen A. Teper; received his undergraduate training at Case Western Reserve University, majoring in Chemistry and English. Bender studied Developmental Genetics at Northwestern University (M.S. and Ph.D. degrees). He served as a U.S. Public Health Fellow in Genetics at the University of California (Berkeley), was a postdoctoral Gosney Fellow at the California Institute of Technology and a Visiting Professor at Yale University Schools of Medicine and Law. His research activities involved the Epidemiology of Human Genetic Disease and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. He was a Carnegie Scholar, Carnegie Foundation, 2001; a Kaneb Teaching Fellow, University of Notre Dame, 2003; and a winner of the Distinguished Hoosier Award. He was an active member of many organizations, including: