Samuel Brown is a Professor of Medicine at University of Utah School of Medicine, performing scientific research on ARDS and sepsis and writing religious history, biomedical ethics, and theology. He also practices medicine as an intensive care unit (ICU) physician. His award-winning first book, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012) investigated the cultural and theological meanings of death and dying within early Latter-day Saint religion, while his Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human (Oxford 2021) presented a careful indictment of usual medical paradigms for grappling with death and dying in the United States. A lapsed atheist and practicing Latter-day Saint, he has written and lectured extensively on Latter-day Saint theology and bioethics in both academic and popular venues. His thinking and feeling on these topics have been shaped in important ways by his late wife, Kate Holbrook (1972–2022), a noted historian of women, religion, and food.