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Holly Fernandez-Lynch

Holly Fernandez Lynch C’03, L’06, MBE’06

Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Asst. Faculty Director of Online Education in the Dept. of Medical Ethics

Holly Fernandez Lynch C’03, L’06, MBE’06 is the John Russell Dickson, MD Presidential Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. She is also Assistant Faculty Director of Online Education in the Department, helping to lead Penn’s first online master’s degree, offered in health care innovation.

Fernandez Lynch’s scholarly work focuses on the ethics and regulation of research with human subjects, including payment to research participants, research with biospecimens, the use of social media in research settings, patient-engaged research, research risks to bystanders, and IRB effectiveness. She is the founder and co-chair of the Consortium to Advance Effective Research Ethics Oversight (AEREO), established in 2018. Professor Fernandez Lynch was named a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in 2019 and will carry out a new line of research focused on the ethics of health care gatekeeping, with a focus on access to investigational therapies outside clinical trials.

Fernandez Lynch has published in leading bioethics, medical, and law journals, including JAMAThe New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Health Affairs, The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and The American Journal of Bioethics, in addition to popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and STAT. She is the author of Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise, as well as the co-editor of seven books, covering human subjects research regulation; FDA regulation of drugs and new technologies; health law and behavioral economics; law, religion, and health; biospecimen research; big data, health law, and bioethics; and transparency in health care.

Fernandez Lynch served as member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP) from 2014-2019 and continues to serve on a SACHRP subcommittee. She will join the Board of Public Responsibility in Medicine & Research (PRIM&R), the leading organization for IRB professionals, in 2020.

Prior to joining Penn, Fernandez Lynch was the Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School (2012-2017) and Teaching Faculty in the Master of Bioethics program at Harvard Medical School. She has worked as an attorney in private practice focused on pharmaceuticals regulation and as a bioethicist at the NIH’s Division of AIDS and President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She served as an IRB member at the Fenway Institute in Boston.

Fernandez Lynch attended college at Penn, was a Levy Scholar in Law and Bioethics at Penn Carey Law, and earned a Master of Bioethics also from Penn.

Most of her papers can be accessed here.