She studied organic chemistry, writing, and religion at Hope College and theology at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her doctorate in theological ethics from Duke University Divinity School. She received a fellowship from the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH and spent a year in Dr. Jeff Murray’s Cooperative Human Linkage Lab at the University of Iowa, one of the major sequencing centers for the Human Genome Project. Subsequently, she was appointed to the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) of the National Institutes of Health. She is professor of theological ethics at three Catholic universities. Lysaught spent a year with CHA as a Visiting Scholar, where she collaborated with associates across Catholic healthcare to discern and articulate a landscape of the theological foundations of this flagship ministry of the Church. This vision is captured in her third book, Caritas in Communion. She worked in Haiti, El Salvador, and Guatemala through research projects in global health.