Holly Fernandez Lynch, JD, MBE, 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. Her scholarship focuses on clinical research ethics, access to investigational medicines, Food and Drug Administration policy, and the ethics of gatekeeping in health care. She is Founder and Co-chair of the Consortium to Advance Effective Research Ethics Oversight, which aims to understand, evaluate, and improve IRB quality through empirical research. She is a member of the Boards of Public Responsibility in Medicine & Research and of the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She is also a member of NYU’s Working Group on Compassionate Use and Preapproval Access, and Ethics Consultant to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
From 2014-2019, she served as a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections. Prior to joining Penn, Professor Fernandez Lynch was Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. She worked as an attorney in private practice focused on pharmaceuticals regulation at Hogan & Hartson, as a bioethicist at the NIH’s Division of AIDS, and as a senior policy and research analyst with President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She attended college at Penn, was a Levy Scholar in Law and Bioethics at the Penn Carey Law School, and earned a Master’s degree in Bioethics also from Penn.
