Having joined UM in 2006 Raymond De Vries, PhD, retires as a professor in the University of Michigan’s Department of Learning Health Sciences and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He was the co-director of the UM Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine and was a visiting professor at the CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. Dr. De Vries published A Pleasing Birth: Midwifery and Maternity Care in the Netherlands (Temple University Press, 2005) and is co-editor of The View from Here: Bioethics and the Social Sciences (Blackwell, 2007) and Bioethics in the Field, a special issue of Social Science in Medicine (2013).
The December 3, 2020 University Record, Regents Round Up, details De Vries' career as follows: "Raymond G. De Vries, professor of learning health sciences, and of obstetrics and gynecology in the Medical School, and professor of sociology in LSA, Dec. 31, 2020. De Vries received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1973 from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and his Master of Arts degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1978 and 1981, respectively. He became an assistant professor at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, and then moved in 1983 to Westmont College, where he was promoted to associate professor and named chair of the Department of Sociology in 1986. He went to St. Olaf College where he was promoted to full professor in 1993 and chaired the Department of Sociology and Anthropology from 1993-96. De Vries joined U-M as an associate professor in 2006 and was promoted to professor in 2008. He assumed the co-director position of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine in 2013, and was named associate director in 2016. De Vries was a visiting professor at the CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care at Maastricht University in The Netherlands from 2010-20. His research focused on the comparative study of health care and maternity care systems and the sociology of bioethics, with a particular concentration on research ethics and the integrity of research. He published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters."