Rivka Amado is a retired Professor and adviser on applied ethics in bioethics and political ethics. She originally trained as a nurse and specialized in critical neonatal units and OBGN, and then worked as clinical educator for five years. She earned her PhD in organizational ethics and education in 1990, from University of Toronto, and has held postdoctoral fellowships in medical ethics at the Hastings Center in New York, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her research focused on organ transplantation, surrogate decision-making and decisions near the end of life. She taught for many years at Tel Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Since moving to the United States in 2004, she has taught at Stanford, Princeton, and UC Berkeley. She is currently teaching at the Legal Studies program at UC Berkeley. On 2022-2023 she was invited to teach courses on Israel politics and society at the department of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara as a Visiting Faculty.
She has received a number of awards for her research and teaching, including the Pew Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Konrad Adenauer Award, and the Faculty Research award from the International Council of Canadian Studies, as well as an award for excellence in teaching at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of numerous articles, monographs, book chapters, and reports on medical ethics, ethics education, political and governmental ethics, moral leadership and business ethics, and has served on the board of two NGOs in Israel. As an ethics adviser to National Transplant Institute of Israel, she helped devise ethics guidelines for organ transplantation and allocation of organs, and develop decision making tools for health care providers. She has also written and helped to implement ethical guidelines for senior civil servants in Israel. In addition to her scholarly work, Rivka maintained an active musical career that is inspired by her Sephardic heritage. She composes, sings, and plays the piano. Over the last fifteen years she has performed in Australia, Spain, Israel, and throughout the United States, including the New York City Sephardic Festival, singing traditional ladino songs and her own compositions.
In addition, she has lectured widely on Sephardic history, and the development and spread of ladino– the universal language of Sephardic Jews throughout the Iberian Peninsula and the old Ottoman Empire. In doing this, she has focused on the role of women in preserving Sephardic culture, and the ladino language and music. Rivka produced three albums one of classical ladino music (Hija Mia) and two others (“Stations of My Life”) and (“Moments of Reflection”) that involved her own original compositions. Many of her performances are previewed on You Tube.