Anna Wexler, PhD

Anna Wexler is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the principal investigator of the Wexler Lab, where she studies how emerging technologies are impacting traditional models of health care and science. In particular, she is interested in how the internet has made health information more accessible to the public, spurring the rise of biomedical citizen science and do-it-yourself medical movements. She has studied how pregnant individuals exchange health information on online pregnancy forums.  

Dr. Wexler is the recipient of a 2018 National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award and is a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the HASTS (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society) program. Prior to academia Dr. Wexler spent several years working as documentary filmmaker and science/travel writer. She co-directed and co-produced the feature documentary film Unorthodox. Her essays have been published in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Slate, and STAT.