Dr Yamin was a panelist for Forum’s discussions on Putting Mothers and Babies First and Girls’ Health and Education.
Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, is a Lecturer on Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Policy Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, and a Senior Associated Researcher at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Yamin’s 20+-year career at the intersection of health, human rights and development has bridged academia and activism. From 2007 to 2011, Yamin held the prestigious Joseph H. Flom Fellow 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 has published dozens of scholarly articles and various books relating to health and human rights, in both English and Spanish, and has been awarded multiple distinctions in respect of her work on health and human rights. Her work is frequently cited by national and global entities, such as the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, as well as by courts enforcing health rights. Between 2011 and 2013, she served as the only non-Colombian independent expert appointed by the Colombian Constitutional Court regarding the implementation of Judgment T 760/08, a major judgment that restructured the health system, and in 2015 was appointed by the Constitutional Implementation Committee of Kenya as only non-Kenyan on the Oversight Committee regarding activities to Implement Rights-based Approaches to Health Services Delivery. In 2015, Yamin was also honored as the Visiting Gladstein Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.
