Patricia J. Zettler

• BA, Stanford University
• JD, Stanford University

Patricia J. Zettler is a nationally-recognized expert on food and drug law and policy. She serves as an Associate Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, a faculty member of the Drug Enforcement & Policy Center housed at the College of Law, and a Member of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. Professor Zettler’s teaching areas include torts, legislation and regulation, health law, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and drug policy.

Zettler’s scholarship has appeared in leading legal, interdisciplinary, and medical journals, such as the Indiana Law Journal, Boston College Law Review, NYU Law Review Online, Food and Drug Law Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Science, and has covered various topics including non-trial preapproval access, citizen science, stem cell interventions, opioids, cannabis products, and tobacco and nicotine products. She also is a co-author of the forthcoming 5th edition of Food and Drug Law: Cases and Materials (with Peter Barton Hutt, Richard A. Merrill, Lewis A. Grossman, Nathan Cortez, and Erika Lietzan).

Since 2020, Professor Zettler has actively worked on issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic response, including serving on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) Committee on Reviewing the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) in 2021. She has been invited to discuss FDA’s pandemic response at NASEM’s Workshop on The Food and Drug Administration’s Emergency Use Authorization, as well as to present to various international and national audiences, including the National Governors Association. She has authored close to a dozen publications related to COVID-19 countermeasures and has been widely quoted and interviewed on the topic in national media outlets.

Professor Zettler currently serves on the Food and Drug Law Institute’s Board of Directors and on the International Society of Cell & Gene Therapy’s Committee on the Ethics of Cell and Gene Therapy, chairing its subcommittee on expanded access to cell and gene therapy. Previously, among other things, she has served on the Food and Drug Law Institute’s Black Lives Matter Advisory Group, the International Society for Stem Cell Research’s Task Force to Revise Guidelines, and the Food and Drug Law Journal’s editorial advisory board, as well as a consultant to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Pain Management and Regulatory Strategies to Address Prescription Opioid Abuse.

Before joining the Ohio State faculty in 2019, Professor Zettler was a faculty member of the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University College of Law. At Georgia State Law, she was selected as the 2018 winner of the Patricia T. Morgan Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Prior to Georgia State, she was a fellow at the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School.

In addition to Professor Zettler’s academic work, she served as an associate chief counsel in the FDA’s Office of the Chief Counsel, where she advised the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services on a wide range of issues. Professor Zettler also has bioethics experience through work at the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of California San Francisco and at the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

Professor Zettler graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School in 2009. She received a BA in psychology, with distinction and departmental honors, from Stanford University in 2002, where she played on the varsity lacrosse team.