Martha Montello, PhD

Martha Montello, PhD is Lecturer for the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland. She is a literary scholar with expertise in narrative ethics and writing for publication. She teaches narrative ethics for medical students, graduate students, and fellows at HMS as well as physicians in the Brigham and Women's Hospital Residency Program in Primary Care and Population Health. She serves as a mentor with expertise in ethics for the Scholars in Medicine program. For the Master in Bioethics, she is course director for an elective in narrative ethics. She also serves as lead faculty for writing support, and as a mentor in the capstone course. Professor Montello is Editor-in-Chief of the Johns Hopkins University Press journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. In Kansas City, she is founding director of the Medical Writing Center at Children’s Mercy Hospital, a teaching and editing service for scientific researchers and scholars. She holds a visiting professorship in narrative ethics at the University of Pavia, Italy. Professor Montello lectures nationally and internationally on narrative approaches to bioethics. Her scholarship has been published widely in journals such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hastings Center Report, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Ethics, Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, New Orleans Review, and the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. She is co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics.

Her Center participation includes teaching in the Master of Science in Bioethics degree program, delivering lectures, actively participating as a capstone mentor, and attending endowed lectures and public forums. In 2022, she received the inaugural Henry K. Beecher Prize for Master's Student Ethics Teaching in recognition of outstanding excellence in master's student ethics teaching at Harvard Medical School.