Michele Moody-Adams became Dean of Columbia College and Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor on July 1, 2009.  She is also Vice President for Undergraduate Education and Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory in Columbia's Philosophy Department.

Before coming to Columbia, Dean Moody-Adams was Vice Provost for Undergraduate education at Cornell, as well as a Professor of Philosophy and Director and Hutchinson Professof in Cornell's Program on  Ethics and Public Life. She does research and teaching on a variety of issues in ethical theory, the history of ethics, political philosophy, practical ethics, the philosophy of law, and the history of philosophy. Professor Moody-Adams has published on such topics as moral relativism, moral objectivity, and moral psychology, as well as on problems of social and economic justice, feminism and equality, and the moral implications of reproductive technologies. She has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and serves on the editorial board of several scholarly journals.

Dean Moody-Adams did her undergraduate degree at Wellesley College;  a second B.A, at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and received her MA and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University.