Rosalyn W. Berne, PhD, is the Anne Shirley Carter Olsson Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

 

Her scholarly work explores the intersections of emerging and converging technologies, ethics, science fiction and myth, and the relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. Her academic books include Animals, Ethics, and Engineering: Intersections & Implications (2025), Creating Life from Life: Biotechnology and Science Fiction (2014), and Nanotalk: Conversations with Scientists and Engineers about Ethics, Meaning, and Belief in the Development of Nanotechnology (2006).

 

She is also the author of When the Horses Whisper (2013), winner of a Living Now Book Award, and Waking to Beauty (2016), recipient of a Nautilus Silver Book Award.

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Growing up in Philadelphia and Amherst, Massachusetts, Rosalyn has spent most of her adult life in central Virginia. Her work and travels have taken her to East and South Asia, Central and South America, West Africa, and Europe, experiences that have continually expanded her sense of the many ways human beings understand and inhabit the world.

 

Rosalyn is also an intuitive interspecies communicator, particularly attuned to equines and cetaceans. In 2012, while riding horseback across the Arenal River in Costa Rica, she fell from her horse into the river. When she climbed back onto the horse, she experienced an unexpected and immediate ability to hear and communicate directly with the animal. The experience became the beginning of a new dimension of her life and work, and she recounts the story in When the Horses Whisper. 

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​In the video below, Rosalyn describes her experience of communicating with horses and the approach she has developed from it.