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Holly Fernandez Lynch
Holly Fernandez Lynch

John Russell Dickson, MD Presidential Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

Former Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School
2012-2017

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Holly Fernandez Lynch, JD, MBioethics, was Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School from 2012 to 2017. In Fall 2017, she stepped down to join the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, where she is the John Russell Dickson, MD Presidential Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Assistant Faculty Director of Online Education. Holly is also a Senior Fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

As Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center, Holly was responsible for oversight of the Center’s sponsored research portfolio, event programming, fellowships, student engagement, development, and a range of other projects and collaborations. She served as Co-Lead of the Law and Ethics Initiative of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University, Co-Lead of the Center’s Involvement with the Regulatory Foundations, Ethics, and Law Program of Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, and co-investigator of the PCORI-funded project “Research Ethics in Patient-Centered Outcomes Research.”  In addition, she was Co-Editor of the Center’s collaborative health policy blog, Bill of Health.

Holly’s scholarship focuses on law, bioethics, and health policy, in particular the regulation and ethical conduct of research with human subjects and conflicts of conscience in health care. She published Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise in 2008 (MIT Press), and has released several co-edited volumes stemming out of Petrie-Flom Center conferences.

During her time at Harvard, Holly was faculty at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, where she co-taught a course on “Health Law, Policy, and Bioethics.” In 2014, she was appointed as a member of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Holly previously practiced FDA law at Hogan & Hartson, LLP (now Hogan Lovells) in Washington, DC.  In addition, Holly has government experience as a bioethicist working with the Human Subjects Protection Branch at the NIH’s Division of AIDS. She was also Senior Policy and Research Analyst for President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, where she worked on Ethically Impossible: STD Research in Guatemala from 1946-1948. Holly has served as a member of the Institutional Review Board at The Fenway Institute, and as a member of expert working groups at the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center at Harvard. 

Holly graduated Order of the Coif from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a Levy Scholar in Law and Bioethics. While pursuing her law degree, Holly earned her Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.