Hello

My name is Danielle Wenner. I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and a 2019-2022 Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics. I'm also the Associate Director of CMU's Center for Ethics & Policy and an Affiliate Faculty Member at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Bioethics and Health Law. My research is focused primarily on the ethics of research involving human subjects and the nature of relationships of power in research and other health-related interactions. My Greenwall Foundation-funded project on the ethics of health research priority-setting reflects a larger theme in my research of seeking to broaden ethical analysis beyond discrete interactions to take account of relevant background conditions and structures of injustice.


I received my PhD in philosophy from Rice University in 2011, after which I completed a clinical ethics fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic in 2013. From 2013 to 2015 I was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of the Humanties at CMU. I have served on the Efficacy Trials Working Group of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network since 2014, and in 2021 joined the Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network. I previously served for 8 years as ethicist on the NHLBI's Blood and Marrow Transplantation Clinical Trials Network Data Safety and Monitoring Board, and also served on the Data Safety annd Monitoring Board for the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV4) Platform, which is part of the National Institute of Health's Collaborating Network of Networks for Evaluating COVID-19 and Therapeutic Strategies (CONNECTS) program. In Spring 2019, I was a Caroline Miles Visiting Scholar at the Ethox Centre in the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford.


Outside of the office I enjoy being active, especially swimming, cycling, and running. At some point I realized that you can do all three of those things on the same day, and since then I have been competing as an amateur age-group triathlete. I also enjoy hiking, climbing, cooking, reading, and cuddling with my cats.