Archived – Policy Director

Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH

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.