Heather Adams, MA, ALB
Heather Adams’s research focuses on adolescents and young adults with an intellectual disability or autism, and she is actively involved in parent- and practitioner-led initiatives supporting adolescents and young adults with an intellectual disability within communities Prior to joining Harvard FXB, she was a fellow at Harvard’s University Committee on Human Rights Studies, where she worked with the university’s Scholars at Risk Program. Ms. Adams continues this work as a member of Harvard’s Scholars at Risk Committee. She is also a member of the Lurie Center’s Transitions Policy Group, which seeks to address policy and access issues for families with autism spectrum disorders. Ms. Adams holds a Master of Studies in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University.
Maneli Aghakhan, PhD
Maneli Agakhan is a child protection specialist and head of the Child Protection Unit at UNICEF Iran. In recent years her work has focused on prevention of violence against children, justice for children, and partnership building with government, civil society, and academic institutions to address juvenile justice, child labor, alternative care for children without caregivers, and child protection in emergencies. She has worked in development and emergency contexts and has contributed to development of the “National Standards for Child Protection in Emergencies” in Iran (2010). Agakhan holds a doctorate in medical laboratory sciences.
Sudhir Anand, PhD, MA
Dr. Sudhir Anand is Professor of Economics at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, and a world-recognized development economist. The author of many books and articles on health economics, human development, and the theory and measurement of economic inequality, he is the lead author of the Cost of Inaction. Anand is Distinguished Visiting Scholar with Harvard FXB and for the past several years has been Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He served as acting director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies from 1997 to 1999. There he led a research initiative exploring the theory and measurement of health equity. Anand has chaired the WHO Committee on Global Health’s systems performance assessment. He received his MA in mathematics and DPhil in economics from the University of Oxford.
Satchit Balsari, MD, MPH
Dr. Satchit Balsari is director of the Global Emergency Medicine Program at Weill Cornell Medical College/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. His interests are focused on humanitarian studies, disaster preparedness, emergency medicine education, and the application of smart technology to advance public health. Committed to global health education, Balsari directs several courses at Weill Cornell, targeting a wide audience ranging from undergraduates to mid-career professionals. He has participated in research and training initiatives in Haiti, UAE, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Iraq, South Sudan, and India. Balsari’s signature initiatives include project EMcounter (a customizable, portable digital surveillance tool, the latest iteration of which was used at the world’s largest mass gathering, the Kumbh Mela in India) and Voices, a crowd-sourced, online disaster response analysis tool. Educated at Grant Medical College in Mumbai, the Harvard School of Public Health, and at Columbia and Cornell’s New York-Presbyterian Emergency Medicine Residency Program, Balsari is currently an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, and an associate faculty member at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
Susan Bartels, MD, MPH
Dr. Bartels is an attending physician in the Emergency Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Her international work has included HIV/AIDS programmatic work in Kenya, working with Burundian refugees in Tanzania, and helping to develop an early warning drought surveillance system in Ethiopia. Dr. Bartels has also helped manage a cholera outbreak in central Ethiopia and participated in the International Rescue Committee’s nationwide mortality study in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has expertise in women’s health and sexual violence as a weapon of war, having lead two research projects in eastern DRC and assisted with a project on war crimes in Darfur. A major focus area for Dr. Bartels is children affected by complex humanitarian emergencies and disasters. In the fall of 2013 Dr. Bartels helped conduct a child protection assessment of Syrian refugees living in Lebanon for Harvard FXB. Dr. Bartels completed a five-year residency in emergency medicine at Queen’s University in Canada followed by a fellowship in international emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Master’s of Public Health at Harvard School of Public Health.
Mihir Bhatt, MA
Mihir Bhatt directs the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, which he founded in 1989. AIDMI began as a three-person team and has grown to a staff of 83 working in 11 activity centers. He is a member of the managing committee for the mumbaiVOICES project, a grassroots effort to record and discuss the Mumbai train bombing of July 11, 2006, and the response to that emergency (http://www.mumbaivoices.com). Bhatt has pushed for “beneficiary feedback” on the performance of NGO and UN humanitarian agencies through his evaluations of the Disaster Emergency Committee’s response to the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, India, and to the recovery following the 2004 South Asian tsunami. He is currently evaluating the humanitarian work of both UN and international nongovernmental agencies on tsunami relief and rehabilitation activities in coastal areas of South India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. Bhatt has received the Russell E. Train Institutional Fellowship from the World Wildlife Fund (1997) for building, from the bottom up, an action-focused research institution focused on a global issue—risk reduction—in the South, the Eisenhower Fellowship (2000), and the Ashoka International Fellowship (2004). Bhatt received a master’s degree in city planning for developing areas from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and a master’s degree in urban and regional planning in India in 1989.
Clara Burbano-Herrera, PhD, LLM
Clara Burbano-Herrera is a Fulbright postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard FXB. Previously, she was co-lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow at the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University and at the Flanders Research Foundation in Belgium. Her research interests are the European, Inter-American, and African systems of human rights, as well as interim measures in international human rights law. In 2008 she received the Prince Bernhard Prize for Innovative Research and has twice been awarded the the Lucía Patiño Osorio Foundation’s Prize for Academic Merit. The goal of Clara’s research at Harvard FXB is to inform the application of an international human rights perspective to the development of strategies that will reduce maternal deaths in Kenya.
Emily Y. Y. Chan, MD, SMPIH, DFPH (UK)
Prof Emily Y. Y. Chan is currently director of the Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response, director of the Centre of Global Health, convener of the Climate Change and Health Study Group, and a member of the faculty of medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Apart from being a public health research expert, she is also an expert in evaluating medical humanitarian interventions in extreme events and in developing health programs in remote and resource-deficient settings. In 2007 Professor Chan established the Climate Change and Health Research Study Group at the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She headed the CUHK-HKO Collaborative Research Team on Climate Change and Health Outcomes from 2012 to 2014. Dr. Chan serves on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals and as a technical expert on the governing boards of various international non-governmental organizations and government advisory groups in areas related to medical humanitarian response, climate change and health and health related interventions in difficult settings.
Hilarie Cranmer, MD, MPH
Dr. Hilarie Cranmer, attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, received her MD from Washington University School of Medicine. At the Harvard School of Public Health, Cranmer received a Master’s in Public Health. She completed her residency in emergency medicine with Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program (HAEMR) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MGH. She completed her fellowship in International Emergency Medicine and Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Cranmer has used her training in emergency medicine and public health to work effectively in crises in the developing world. She has done work in post-conflict Kosovo, AIDS-ravaged Africa, tsunami-and-conflict-affected Indonesia and Sri Lanka, hurricane-impacted Louisiana after Katrina, earthquake-devastated Haiti and Arab-spring affected Tunisia. Cranmer uses her experiences in these disaster stricken areas to help prepare leaders in the fields of emergency medicine and humanitarian crises. She has implemented didactic and hands-on training for all ranges of providers. She has been the Director of Education in the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a Harvard-University wide program that seeks to provide a multidisciplinary response for humanitarian interventions. She is also the founding Director of the Global Women’s Health Fellowship Program, in the Division of Women’s Health at BWH.
Chris Desmond, PhD, MCom
Dr. Chris Desmond is a chief research specialist in the HIV/AIDS, STIs and TB (HAST) research program for the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in Pretoria, South Africa. He holds an MCom in Economics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (formerly the University of Natal), and obtained a PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. Previously, he was a research specialist at Harvard FXB and worked for the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) at the University of Natal. His areas of research interest include: the implications of HIV and AIDS for children, economic evaluation of policy options and early childhood development. Desmond’s publication record spans the authoring and co-authoring of more than 25 journal articles, book chapters and books. His most recent work was the The Cost of Inaction, published by Harvard FXB as the culmination to the Cost of Inaction project, spearheaded by Amartya Sen and Sudhir Anand. The project develops and applies a new approach to the economic evaluation of interventions. The pilot applications of this work focus on interventions for children affected by poverty and HIV/AIDS in Rwanda and Angola.
Vasileia Digidiki, MA, PhD
Vasileia Digidiki is a visiting scholar at Harvard FXB. Her research examines sex trafficking in Greece, focusing on victim and client blaming and on the micro- and macro-social factors responsible for preventing re-victimization. Digidiki joined Harvard FXB in 2014, after being awarded the Greek State Scholarship. She then collaborated with the center’s Roma rights team on an investigation into the school segregation of Roma children in Europe. Digidiki earned her PhD in social psychology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and holds two master’s degrees, one in forensic psychology and the other in social psychology. Currently, she is also conducting research on an unfolding humanitarian crisis: the flight by the thousands to Greece of Syrian refuges and Asian immigrants using unmanned and unsafe rafts.
Gregg Greenough, MD, MPH
Dr. Gregg Greenough has worked extensively in applying epidemiologic methods to public health problems within conflict and disaster-affected populations. After graduating from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, he completed a residency and fellowship in Emergency Medicine at UCLA and earned an MPH at Johns Hopkins University. He held joint faculty positions in Emergency Medicine and International Health at Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and Public Health while working at the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response there. Greenough has worked in relief operations in the Balkans, Central America, Africa, the US, and the Palestinian Territories and has researched disaster preparedness in Tanzania; protracted refugee health in Kenya, Tanzania, and Colombia; the burden of disease in the Hurricane Katrina displaced population; the effects of landmines on human security in Angola; and has directed two national nutrition and food security studies and an emergency medicine development project in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
As research director of HHI, Greenough provides senior leadership in establishing the Initiative’s research agenda, designing and implementing field studies, supervising the analysis of data, interpreting data to relevant humanitarian stakeholders and the academic world, and mentoring the next generation of humanitarian health workers. He is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and continues to practice emergency medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital as an attending physician and faculty member of Division of International Health and Humanitarian Programs in the Department of Emergency Medicine.
Elizabeth D. Gibbons, MA
Elizabeth D. Gibbons is currently a senior fellow and visiting scientist at Harvard FXB and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance at St. Edwards University. Prior to these 2011 appointments, Gibbons enjoyed a lengthy career in the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), where she served most recently as deputy director of policy and practice and associate director of gender, rights and civic engagement in UNICEF’s New York headquarters. There she was responsible for providing guidance to the organization’s normative and operational work on gender and human rights, adolescent development/participation, and communication for development. As chief of global policy from 2002 to 2007, she led establishment of economic and social policy analysis as a central focus of UNICEF’s action for advancing rights and well-being of children in the twenty-first century, shifting evidence-based advocacy from the margins to the core of the organization’s work. She had a major role in shaping UNICEF’s global human rights advocacy, increasing visibility of children in poverty-reduction policy dialogue and human rights bodies, while leading the development of analytical tools and advocacy strategies for placing children at the center of social, economic and juridical policies at national level. Gibbons’ career in social development and humanitarian affairs has spanned more than three decades, during which she lived and worked in Togo, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, and served as head of UNICEF’s offices in Haiti and in Guatemala. She also served as strategic regional advisor to UNICEF’s Haiti operations, following the devastating earthquake of 2010. A graduate of Smith College and Columbia University, Gibbons is the author of Sanctions in Haiti: Human Rights and Democracy under Assault, and a contributing author to several other books.
Kathleen Hamill, JD, MALD
Kathleen Hamill is a human rights lawyer and adjunct assistant professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, where she teaches courses on human rights and international law. She has worked as an independent researcher, advocate, and consultant in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. This includes academic work and fellowships in Angola (conflict management), Brazil (Human Rights Watch), Sweden (NIR), Colombia (Fletcher), and Lebanon (KAFA). Hamill also has authored a number of legal analyses on issues related to corporate accountability, cluster munitions, migrant workers, structural violence, and human trafficking. Previously, she worked as manager of human rights programs at Reebok International. In the fall of 2013 she conducted an assessment of Syrian refugees, with a focus on child protection, in Lebanon for Harvard FXB. Hamill holds a Juris Doctorate from Boston College Law School, a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, and a B.A. from Brown University.
Lynne Jones, OBE, FRCPsych, PhD, Visiting Scientist
Dr. Lynne Jones is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, writer, researcher and relief worker. Until August of 2011, she was the senior technical advisor in mental health for International Medical Corps. In 2011, she held a research fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study at Harvard. She is a course director at the International Institute for Humanitarian Affairs, Fordham University and consults to WHO. She has a PhD in social psychology and political science. She has been engaged in assessing mental health needs and establishing and running mental health services in disaster, conflict, and post-conflict settings, since 1990 including Central America, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Aceh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, New Orleans, Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, the Middle East and Haiti. After one year as the adviser in early child development for the Aga Khan Foundation in Northern Mozambique, she is now working as a consultant child psychiatrist in the UK. She also consults to UNICEF and WHO. She was a member of ICD 11 stress disorders working group and a technical consultant in the development of the new mhGAP module on Conditions Specifically Related to Stress by WHO and UNHCR. In October 2013 the new edition of her book, Then They Started Shooting: Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become, was published by Bellevue Literary Press. In 2001, she was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for her mental health work in conflict-affected areas of Central Europe.
Tanya Jones
Tanya Jones will be a fellow through Summer 2016. A doctoral candidate at UC Berkley, Tanya has been engaged in international health as a development practitioner, a scholar, and a philanthropist. As a portfolio manager at the Barr Foundation, she led the community health portfolio in East Africa, and was instrumental in developing innovative programs to improve public health. She has also worked with Pathfinder International, the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, and the Population Council in Ghana on issues of human rights and development. She holds advanced degrees in sociology and public policy from Princeton University and UC Berkley, and has extensive field experience in Ghana. While at Harvard FXB, Jones will be consulting on projects to improve maternal health and as well as her own research and writing about the institutionalization of national health policies aimed at increasing access to health care in rural Ghana.
Siddharth Kara, JD, MBA
Siddharth Kara is a visiting scientist and fellow on Forced Labor with Harvard FXB and a fellow with the Carr Center Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery. He is recognized as an expert on contemporary slavery and is best known for his award-winning book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, the first of three books he is writing on the subjects of human trafficking and contemporary slavery. Sex Trafficking was named co-winner of the prestigious 2010 Frederick Douglass Award at Yale University for the best non-fiction book on slavery. The award is generally regarded as the top prize in the field of slavery scholarship, and Kara’s is the first book on modern slavery to receive the award. In addition to his books, Kara has authored several academic and law journal articles. Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, he has traveled to twenty-five countries across six continents to research these crimes, interviewing over a thousand former and current slaves of all kinds, witnessing firsthand the sale of humans into slavery, and confronting some of those who trafficked and exploited them. Kara currently advises the United Nations, the U.S. Government, and several other governments on antislavery research, policy and law. His second book on slavery, Bonded Labor: Inside the System of Slavery in South Asia was published in the fall of 2012. Kara is a regular contributor to the CNN Freedom Project, and his ongoing research into slavery around the world has been covered by CNN, the BBC, and CNBC. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a law degree, an MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.
Michael D. Lappi, MPH, MS, DO, PhD
Dr. Michael Lappi has extensive experience in the field of humanitarian relief and disaster medicine having served throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America. In 2005, Lappi led the first ever American Red Cross Public Health Team during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita relief efforts and conducted a comprehensive assessment and analysis of over 200 shelters and nearly 25,000 evacuees. Most recently, he provided invaluable medical assistance to the people of Chad during a violent rebel uprising. His research interests are focused on civilian-military interactions, disaster response, and medicine in austere environments. He is a graduate of the University of Miami, The Ohio State University, Ohio University, Harvard School of Public Health, and the Naval War College. Lappi currently serves as a preventive medicine specialist for the United States Navy.
Jay Lemery, MD, FACEP FAWM
Dr. Jay Lemery is an assistant professor at the Weill Cornell Medical College and has an interest in the effects of environmental change on health and human rights. He is the director of Cornell Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, a university-wide collaboration promoting education, research, and training in unpredictable and austere environments. He serves as a member of the Global Health Steering Committee at Weill Cornell. Lemery is a consultant to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Climate and Health Program, and a visiting scientist at Harvard FXB Center. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Roger-Claude Liwanga, LLM, LLL
Roger-Claude Liwanga is a visiting scholar with Boston University’s African Studies Center, and the co-founder of Promote Congo, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for human rights and alleviating poverty in the Congo. In 2012 Mr. Liwanga worked as a continuing legal education expert for the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative, where he designed training modules and trained ABA staff and law professors in North and South Kivu (DRC) on interactive techniques of teaching law to enable them to develop their own continuing legal education courses for legal professionals. Prior to that, he worked for The Carter Center in various capacities, including as a legal consultant. There he developed a training module to train Congolese magistrates on the protection of children against trafficking for economic exploitation in the mining industry. Mr. Liwanga is currently producing a short documentary on child labor in the DRC’s artisanal mines, and is a contributor to The CNN Freedom Project and The Global Post. He holds a LL.M. in Human Rights Law from the University of Cape Town (South Africa), a Licence en Droit from Université Protestante au Congo (DRC), and a Certificate in International Human Rights Law from the International Institute of Human Rights (Strasbourg-France).
Allan Maleche
Allan Maleche will be an FXB Fellow from September to December 2015. As a human rights lawyer and executive director of KELIN, a human rights organization that works to protect and promote human rights related to HIV in East Africa, Maleche has achieved notable successes in using the law to shape health policy in Kenya and to help Kenyans realize the right to health through education, litigation, and advocacy. Under Maleche’s leadership, KELIN recently brought a case challenging the forced and coerced sterilization of HIV+ pregnant women to the Kenyan High Court. While at Harvard FXB, Allan will be working with Alicia Ely Yamin, director of policy initiatives, on a case study of the impact of a Colombian Constitutional Court decision on that country’s health care system, as well on as a NORAD funded project, “Operationalizing the Right to Health in Health Service Delivery.”
Ketevan Melikadze, MA, MD
Ketevan Melikadze is a social welfare officer at UNICEF Georgia. Her work mainly centers on supporting the government to develop systems and services to protect the most vulnerable children, namely, those with disabilities, child victims of violence, children under state care, and children living and working on the streets. Melikadze has worked as a policy analyst and consultant in education, health, and other social fields; managed an NGO working with children with disabilities; and lectured and tutored students and professionals in public policy and policy analysis.
Elizabeth Newnham, MPsych, PhD
Dr. Elizabeth Newnham is an Early Career Fellow at Harvard FXB. Her research examines mental health outcomes for children and adolescents living in chronic adversity, and the development and evaluation of evidence-based interventions in disaster and post-conflict settings. Newnham joined Harvard FXB in 2010 as the inaugural American Australian Association Morgan Stanley Pediatrics Fellow. She completed her Master of Psychology (Clinical) and PhD at The University of Western Australia, for which she was awarded a University Distinction and the Australian Psychological Society Award. Newnham has since conducted work in child and adolescent mental health, post-emergency resilience, and human rights in Australia, Singapore, Sierra Leone, China, India and the United States. She recently received an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Sidney Sax Fellowship to examine the mediating role of daily hardship in post-traumatic stress responses among war- and disaster-affected children. She holds concurrent positions at the University of Oxford, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and The University of Western Australia.
Jumana Odeh, MD, MPH
A pediatrician, public health expert and director of the Palestinian Happy Child Center, Dr. Jumana Odeh is an acknowledged health leader in the Palestinian Occupied Territory. Odeh commenced her medical service to the Palestinian people in 1981 as a hospital pediatrician at Augusta Victoria Hospital – Jerusalem and as a project manager volunteer for Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees “UPMRC,” followed by a stint as a team leader at Caritas Baby Hospital – Bethlehem. She has worked with UNICEF, participating in their national programming to improve the quality of medical care given to Palestinian children, and held a series of consultancies with Save the Children/USA, Swiss Development Cooperation, Australian Red Cross, OXFAM, Norwegian People’s Aid and International Development Research Center/Canada. In 2000, she joined the faculty of Medical School – Al Quds University. In 2001-2004 she was a Senior Child Health Advisor for MARAM, a health project funded by USAid. Since 2004, she has been a child health advisor to the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health – UK. She was a founding member and served as president of UPMRC, PHCC & Physicians for Human Rights/Palestine. She has participated as an expert at more than 100 international workshops, conferences and in numerous “evidence-based” studies. She is a frequent writer for the IHT, Ha’aretz, and has appeared as a health expert on Al-Jazeera, Abu Dhabi TV, CNN, BBC and Ted Koppel’s “Nightline.” Odeh was the 2008 winner of the prestigious World of Children’s “Nobel Prize for Children” award.
Diana Goretty Oviedo
Ms. Oviedo will be an FXB Fellow from September to December 2015. She is a doctoral candidate in public health at the National University of Colombia, and the recipient of the prestigious Colciencias scholarship. She has already been engaged with Harvard FXB through the Global School in 2014, and as a guest lecturer in the July 2015 nano-course, “Health and Human Rights,” at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. While at Harvard FXB Diana will be working with Alicia Ely Yamin on a case study of the impact of a Colombian Constitutional Court decision on the health care system of Colombia, as well as writing her dissertation about the judicialization of health policy in Bogota, Colombia.
Deborah Rose, MPH, SM, PhD
Dr. Rose is a visiting scholar at Harvard FXB. She is a chronic disease epidemiologist with interests in psychosocial epidemiology, demography, environmental health, and sustainable development. She has spent over 20 years designing and analyzing data from the US National Health Interview Survey focusing on 1990 Health Objectives, Healthy People 2010, tobacco use, Hispanic health, and advising the Ministries of Health of Hungary, Mexico, and Taiwan on best practices for their health interview surveys. She also was the first to advise the National Health Interview Survey of Mexico asking Mexican women about breast cancer screening practices. The resulting module uncovered the previously hidden epidemic of female breast cancer in that country. Two of her current projects are (1) co-chairing a conference on the formulation, assignment, protection, and use of national identification number systems, to be held at Harvard in November 2015 and (2) working with the University of Cape Coast, the Yale Alumni Service Corps, and the community of Yamoransa, Ghana, to bring computing, clean water, and sanitation to this crossroads village. In this capacity she is enstooled as Nana Abena Nkosuo Hemaa (Queen Mother for Development). Dr. Rose has an MPH and PhD from Yale University and an SM in population studies from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
Yasemin Sirali
Yasemin Sirali is international programs adviser at the Mother Child Education Foundation (ACEV) and director of social investment projects at FIBA Group in Turkey. Prior to joining FIBA and ACEV in 2010, Ms. Sirali worked as a management consultant at the New York City and Philadelphia offices of Deloitte Consulting, where she provided consulting and advisory services to multinational companies on strategic and operational business issues. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2001 with an honors degree in economics and French literature and obtained her MBA at the Harvard Business School in 2006. She is a Young Global Leader of the BMW Foundation and a founding member of the First Lego League Science Heroes Association in Turkey. At Harvard FXB, Ms. Sirali is working on developing a case for Harvard Chan School of Public Health’s child protection master’s curriculum.
Richard Sollom, MA, MPH
Richard Sollom is a senior fellow and visiting scientist at the FXB Center, where he focuses on child protection during emergencies. His expertise lies in the documentation of war crimes and crimes against humanity and specifically in field epidemiology to quantify the prevalence of international crimes. He also serves as an expert for UN Women on investigating sexual and gender-based violence as international crimes. Sollom has investigated human rights violations in 23 countries including Albania, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chad, Congo, Egypt, Libya, Myanmar, Rwanda, Syria, and Zimbabwe. He has interviewed more than 1,000 victims of human rights abuse including some 200 survivors of torture and rape. He has worked with both intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, most recently with the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He has also served with the UN peacekeeping operation in Somalia as resettlement officer, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Burundi as protection officer during the Rwandan genocide, and with the UN civilian mission to Haiti as human rights monitor. Sollom is a former US Peace Corps Volunteer (Hungary), Albert Schweitzer fellow (USA), and Fulbright fellow (France) and holds advanced degrees from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Pamela Steiner, EdD, MA
Dr. Pamela Steiner is a senior fellow with Harvard FXB, a senior fellow with HHI, and the project director of HHI’s Inter-Communal Violence and Reconciliation Project. Her current project aims to improve the relationship between Turkish and Armenian populations. A co-founder of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center of International Affairs (1995-2003), Steiner is knowledgeable about the nature and healing of trauma and on the dynamics between interpersonal, intra- and intergroup relations and individuals’ consciousness capacities. She has extensive experience in conflict resolution and reconciliation efforts with many groups, including Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Turks, and Germans and Jews. Steiner also practices as a psychotherapist and specializes in working with individuals who have a history of trauma. She is certified in Somatic Experiencing, a new approach to healing from trauma. Her understanding about the nature and healing of trauma in individuals informs her work with HHI. For twelve years she was a clinical instructor in psychology at Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
Jessica Stern, PhD, MA
Jessica Stern is a fellow at Harvard FXB, an advanced academic candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis, and a senior research fellow at the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is also a member of Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law. She is the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, selected by the Washington Post as a best book of the year; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, selected by the New York Times as a notable book of the year; The Ultimate Terrorists; and numerous articles on terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. She is a fellow of both MacDowell and Yaddo artists’ colonies. In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for her work on trauma and terror, as well as an Erik Erikson Scholarship. Stern taught at Harvard University from 1999-2010. She served on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff in 1994-95. Stern was selected by Time Magazine in 2001 as one of seven thinkers whose innovative ideas “will change the world.” Stern advises a number of government agencies on issues related to terrorism and has taught courses for government officials. Stern is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was named a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow, a National fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a fellow of the World Economic Forum, and a Harvard MacArthur fellow. Stern earlier worked as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She has a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, in chemistry; a master’s degree from MIT in technology policy; and a doctorate from Harvard University in public policy.
Anne Stetson, JD, MA
Anne Stetson is the president of Lighthouse Global Consulting, a strategic consulting firm advising foundations and nonprofit organizations working around the world to advance global health, human rights, and social entrepreneurship. Prior to engaging in strategic consulting, she worked with the Americas Program of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), and practiced international corporate and investment law for 10 years in New York and in Boston. Stetson serves as a director of ACCION International, the John Merck Fund, the Lookout Foundation, and Confluence Philanthropy; she is a past director of Physicians for Human Rights and the Vance Center for International Justice. She is a member of the bars of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Stetson is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has published articles and books in the areas of human rights, impact investing, and foreign investments. She is fluent in Spanish and French. Stetson holds a BA in English Literature from Yale University, an MA in international affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a JD from Boston University. She also studied at Columbia Law School, where she co-founded the Journal of Gender and Law, and served as an editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.
Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH
Dr. Michael VanRooyen is director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, director of the Division of International Health and Humanitarian Programs in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He has worked extensively in humanitarian assistance in over 30 countries affected by war and disaster, including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, both as a physician and a policy advisor with numerous relief organizations, including CARE, Save the Children, Physicians for Human Rights, and Samaritans Purse International Relief. He has served as a special advisor for the World Health Organization and as a member of the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Health Cluster. VanRooyen provided relief assistance at the site of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11th with the American Red Cross and also helped to coordinate the American Red Cross public health response to Hurricane Katrina, sending over 20 physicians from the Harvard system to hurricane-devastated regions.
Carmel Williams, PhD
Dr. Carmel Williams is the executive editor of Health and Human Rights, Harvard FXB’s flagship publication. She has held this position since 2011. Dr. Williams holds a PhD in community health. Her thesis, which arose from her work in development, was on operationalizing the right to health in aid-funded programs. She was the executive director of a New Zealand-based health NGO for eight years and holds research fellowships at the University of Auckland in both the Development Studies department and at the School of Population Health. Having worked in development programs in the Pacific region for the past 15 years, Dr. Williams maintains her research interests in that region. Her most recent work on maternal and infant health takes place in Papua New Guinea.