Gary Lynn Comstock is Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University where he studies and teaches critical thinking and civil discourse. He directs two multi-institution initiatives that bring evidence-based reasoning tools into undergraduate classrooms. The first, Integrating Civil Discourse into the Curriculum (ICDC), funded by the U.S. Department of Education, joins NC State with Notre Dame, Harvard, and a national network of partner campuses to train faculty fellows in argument analysis and structured dialogue. The second, Integrating Civil Discourse into the University of North Carolina System Curriculum (ICDC-NC), is supported by the UNC System Common Ground collaborative. ICDC-NC is the first initiative to implement ICDC's work across an entire state and it involves all 17 UNC campuses. Both ICDC and ICDC-NC rely on Thinker, an online course in argument mapping arguments; Sway, a chat platform for AI-assisted discussion of contested questions; and CRIT, an assessment instrument measuring gains in students’ reasoning. 

Comstock’s research also addresses the question of how we should treat animals based on what their brains and behaviors reveal about their minds. With Peter Singer and Adam Lerner he has written legal briefs and an op-ed, "Why the Court Should Free Happy" (2022); with eleven other philosophers he coauthored Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers' Brief (Routledge, 2019). His essay, "The Shrimp Hypothesis" was named a Best Paper at the London School of Economics conference on Interspecies Comparisons of Welfare  (2022); and "Imagining Other Species' Pains" won Best Oral Presentation at the 2025 International  Conference on Animals. His New York Times article, "You Should Not Have Let Your Baby Die" (2017) received an honorable mention in the PEA Soup Ethics Prize competition.  

He is the author of Research Ethics: A Philosophical Guide to the Responsible Conduct of Research (Cambridge, 2013) and Vexing Nature? On the Ethical Case Against Agricultural Biotechnology (Kluwer, 2000), and the editor or coeditor of several volumes, including The Moral Rights of Animals (Lexington, 2017) and Life Science Ethics (2002; 2nd ed., 2010). From 2007 to 2009 he was a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, where he then served three years as editor-in-chief of its On the Human project. NC State named him Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2015 and Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor in 2020, the latter after he created How We Evaluate (now called Essays), an online critical-thinking course.

Before coming to NC State, Comstock was Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University where he helped to establish the Bioethics Institute, a faculty development workshop that trained roughly five hundred scientists to integrate ethics into their teaching. He earned graduate degrees from the University of Chicago.