Lance Wahlert is Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy; and Director of the Master of Bioethics (MBE) program in the Perelman School of Medicine.  Dr. Wahlert is also standing faculty in English, Cinema/Media Studies, and Gender/Sexuality Studies at Penn.

Author/editor of over 30 peer-review articles on bioethics and medical humainties, Professor Wahlert is also Residential Faculty Fellow at Greogry College House in Penn's College House system, where he serves as Faculty Diretor of the House's Film Culture Program.

After receiving his B.A. in English and History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, Professor Wahlert earned an M.A. in Irish poetics from Johns Hopkins, an M.Sc. in History of Science from Imperial College London, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.  Dr Wahlert’s scholarly interests include narrative medicine, clinical ethics, the history of LGBTQ medicine, disability theory, cinema studies, and Irish & Norwegian literatures.

Accordingly, he has held residential fellowships at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine (London), Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast, the University of Oslo, King's College London, the British Film Institute, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.  Since 2010, Professor Wahlert has served visiting professorships in clinical ethics & mecical humanities at: the Cleveland Clinic; the University of Turku (Finland); the Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland); Princeton University; Dartmouth College; Dickinson College; and UT Southwest (Dallas) .

Professor Wahlert's scholarship on queer ethics and medical humanities has been funded by numerous influential medical/policy institutions: the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Pew Foundation, the World Health Organizatin (WHO), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  Accordingly, Professor Wahlert’s scholarship has been featured in academic publications such as Bioethics, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Humanities, the journal Medicine and Literature, the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics, the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, and The Hastings Center Report.

Professor Wahlert has also served as guest editor of five special issues of academic journals dedicated to the intersections of bioethics, narrative, queer theory, disability studies, and the history of medicine:

1. “Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity” for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (2012);

2. “Queer in the Clinic” for the Journal of Medical Humanities (2013);

3. “Mapping Queer Bioethics: Space, Place, and Locality” for the Journal of Homosexuality (2016);

4. "Choosing Disability: Bioethics and Disability" for the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (2018).

5. "Pediatric Ethics under COVID-19" for the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics (forthcoming 2021).