Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MSc, Director of Research
Jacqueline Bhabha is Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, the director of the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies, and a lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. From 1997 to 2001 she directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, Bhabha was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She received a first class honors degree and an MSc from Oxford University, and a Juris Doctor from the College of Law in London. She has recently authored Seeking Asylum Alone, three reports about unaccompanied child asylum seekers. Her writings on issues of migration and asylum in Europe and the United States include a coauthored book, Women’s Movement: Women under Immigration, Nationality and Refugee Law; an edited volume, Asylum Law and Practice in Europe and North America, and many articles, including “Internationalist Gatekeepers? The Tension Between Asylum Advocacy and Human Rights” and “The Citizenship Deficit: On Being a Citizen Child.” She is currently working on issues of child migration, smuggling and trafficking, and citizenship.
Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH
An expert in public health rights-based responses to humanitarian crises, Dr. Leaning is the FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Her appointment followed an international search for a successor to Jim Yong Kim, director of Harvard FXB from 2006 to 2009.
Prior to her current appointment, Dr. Leaning served as co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. From 1999 to 2005, she directed the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights here at Harvard FXB, during which time she also served as editor-in-chief of Medicine & Global Survival, an international quarterly. She is faculty associate at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Center for International Development, and is the former senior advisor in international and policy studies at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Leaning serves on the boards of the Humane Society of the United States and the Massachusetts Bay Chapter of the American Red Cross. She is the editor of a seminal textbook, Humanitarian Crises: The Medical and Public Health Response, published by Harvard University Press in 1999. Leaning teaches teaches disaster management, human rights, and public health and policy response to humanitarian crises in the School’s Department of Global Health and Population. She received her AB degree from Radcliffe College, magna cum laude, a master’s degree in demography and public health from the Harvard School of Public Health, and her MD with honors from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, Policy Director
Alicia Ely Yamin is a lecturer on global health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, director of the JD/MPH program, policy director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, and a senior associated researcher at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen, Norway. Trained in both law and public health at Harvard, for over 20 years Yamin’s career at the intersection of health and human rights has bridged academia and activism. From 2007 to 2011 Yamin held the prestigious Joseph H. Flom Fellowship on Global Health and Human Rights at Harvard Law School. Prior to that she served as director of research and investigations at Physicians for Human Rights, where she oversaw all of the organization’s field investigations, and on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Yamin is known globally for her pioneering scholarship and advocacy in relation to economic and social rights and rights-based approaches to health, for which she has received multiple distinctions. She has contributed to the drafting of multiple General Comments by UN treaty bodies, as well as UN Human Rights Council resolutions. She regularly advises UN bodies on health and human rights, and has provided strategic guidance to non-governmental organizations as well as courts on landmark litigations concerning health rights and sexual and reproductive rights in various countries and regions, as well as in supra-national adjudication. Yamin currently serves on the Lancet-O’Neil Institute Commission on Global Health and the Law and is the 2015-16 Visiting Gladstein Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.