Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH, assumed the position of Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights on January 1, 2010. 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 School of Public Health and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her appointment followed an international search for a successor to Jim Yong Kim, Director from 2006 to 2009. As Steven E. Hyman, provost of Harvard University, noted in the Harvard Gazette, “Jennifer's experience on the ground in hotspots from Afghanistan to Somalia gives her a unique perspective on the connection between human rights and public health. We are excited to think about the ways in which the FXB Center and its commitment to children's health will evolve under her leadership.”

The FXB Center was founded in 1993 with the support of philanthropist Albina du Boisrouvray and places special attention on the rights of children. In announcing the selection of Dr. Leaning, HSPH Dean Julio Frenk expressed gratitude to du Boisrouvray for her generous support, adding, “The FXB Center represents an extraordinary commitment to improving the lives of children living in vulnerable circumstances around the globe. I am confident that Dr. Leaning will increase that commitment and strengthen the center's sense of mission.”

Prior to her current appointment, Dr. Leaning served as Co-Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. From 1999 to 2005, Dr. Leaning directed the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights at the FXB Center, during which time she also served as Editor-in-Chief of Medicine & Global Survival, an international quarterly. She is Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and the Center for International Development at Harvard University, and is the former Senior Advisor in International and Policy Studies at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 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 formerly served on the boards of Physicians for Human Rights (an organization she co-founded), Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Oxfam America. She is Visiting Editor of the British Medical Journal, serves on the editorial board of Health and Human Rights: An International Journal, and is a member of the Board of Syndics at Harvard University Press. She is on the faculty of HSPH’s Department of Global Health and Population, and teaches disaster management, human rights, and public health and policy response to humanitarian crises. She edited a seminal textbook on the topic, Humanitarian Crises: The Medical and Public Health Response, published by Harvard University Press in 1999.

Dr. Leaning has documented human rights abuses and provided medical care and public health services on the ground to refugees in almost every crisis over the last twenty years, including humanitarian emergencies in Afghanistan, Albania, Kosovo, Angola, Darfur, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Somalia, and the African Great Lakes region. She was awarded a Special Citation for Exceptional Volunteer Service by the American Red Cross and the Humanitarian Rose Award by the People's Princess Charitable Foundation in the UK. One of the first to identify the conflict in Darfur as genocide after extensive field investigations, Dr. Leaning testified before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, the United States Congress, and the United Nations on the plight of women in humanitarian crises, particularly in the case of Darfur. 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.

Jacqueline Bhabha is 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 Kennedy School. From 1997 to 2001 she directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she 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 JD from the College of Law in London. She has recently authored three reports entitled Seeking Asylum Alone 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.

Theresa Betancourt is Assistant Professor of Child Health and Human Rights in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Dr. Betancourt is a member of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, where she directs the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPGCA). Her central research interests focus on the developmental and psychosocial consequences of concentrated adversity on children and families, resilience and protective processes in child refugee mental health, health and human rights, and applied cross-cultural mental health research.

Dr. Betancourt is the Principal Investigator of an ongoing longitudinal study of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, which provides the basis for a planned intervention study of war affected youth. She is currently collaborating with Partners in Health Rwanda on a mixed-methods study assessing mental health services needs of HIV/AIDS-affected youth and an adaptation of evidence-based preventative interventions for use in this site. She recently served as Co-Principle Investigator of a randomized-controlled trial of interventions for the treatment of depression symptoms in northern Ugandan IDP youth. Her prior research investigated social connectedness and mental health among Chechen IDP youth, and the relationship between caregiver and youth mental health among Kunama refugees living on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.

Dr. Betancourt graduated summa cum laude in psychology from Linfield College and holds a Master’s degree in art therapy from the University of Louisville. She completed her doctoral work in maternal and child health with concentrations in psychiatric epidemiology and health and human rights at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2003.

Previously, Dr. Betancourt worked as a mental health clinician in both school and community settings and consulted on global children’s mental health issues for various international NGOs and United Nations agencies, including work with the United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict in 1999.

She was recently awarded a K01 Career Development Award from the National Institutes for Mental Health to study modifiable protective processes in the mental health of refugee children and adolescents.

Nancy Cott is Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Cott taught at Yale University from 1975 to 2001, beginning as an assistant professor and departing as the Sterling Professor of History and American Studies. She was a founder of Yale's women's studies program in the late 1970s and chaired the program from 1980 to 1987. At Harvard, Cott teaches US history focusing on gender issues.

Cott’s books include The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (Yale University Press, 1977), The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University Press, 1987), A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters (Yale University Press, 199l), and Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2000). Her articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Journal of American History, Journal of Social History, William and Mary Quarterly, The Yale Review, and Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Sarah Dougherty is a research associate supporting Dr. Jacqueline Bhabha across multiple projects. She is on the legal staff at the Institute of Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and is a legal analyst for Partners In Health/Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti’s prison health advocacy initiative. Dougherty holds a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law and a Master’s in Public Health from Tufts University School of Medicine.

Policy Director Arlan Fuller has experience in international policy, federal government operations, and legislative strategy. He has served as a public affairs consultant to the Formosan Association for Public Relations, a Taiwanese-American organization, where he worked with Formosan and the Taiwanese government in coordinating their legislative efforts in the US Congress. He has also been a consultant to the Citizens Trade Campaign, where he advised grassroots labor and trade organizations on strategy for legislative campaigns regarding the Chile and Singapore Free Trade Agreements. He was the Legislative Assistant for international relations and trade policy to Congressman Sherrod Brown, a senior member of the House International Relations Committee. In this role, he was responsible for the Congressman’s policy campaign to increase USAID funding for anti-tuberculosis efforts as well as organizing a legislative and whipping strategy with the House Democratic Caucus on trade policy issues. Mr. Fuller also worked for Senator Edward Kennedy, serving on the Senator’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee staff, and focused on National Institutes of Health grants. Mr. Fuller received his BA in economics from the College of the Holy Cross. He holds a master’s degree in peace and conflict studies from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and a JD from Boston College Law School.

Elizabeth Gibbons, MA

Lynne Jones, PhD

Orla Kelly, JD, MBA

Dr. Palfrey is director of the Childcare International Pediatric Center at Children's Hospital Boston, and is a professor in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. She was chief of the Division of General Pediatrics at Children's Hospital for 25 years, and was the 2009-2010 president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Dr. Palfrey is the author of five books, including Community Child Health (Praeger Press, 1994) and Child Health in America (Johns Hopkins Press, 2006).

Hashim Sarkis is the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture, and is a practicing architect working in Cambridge and Lebanon.

Dr. Sarkis is author of several books, including Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis (Beirut: Dar Annahar, 2003), co-editor with Peter G. Rowe of Projecting Beirut (Munich: Prestel, 1998), editor of CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital (Munich: Prestel, 2001), and executive editor of the CASE publication series (GSD/Prestel), a series on architecture and urban design published in collaboration with Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

Anne Stetson is the president of Lighthouse Consulting, a strategic consulting firm advising foundations and nonprofit organizations working globally 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. 

Ms. Stetson serves as a senior advisor to Springcreek Advisors LLC, an investment firm to foundations and families with an impact investing focus. She serves as a director of ACCION International, Physicians for Human Rights, the Vance Center for International Justice, the John Merck Fund, and Lookout Foundation. She is a member of the bars of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.  Ms. Stetson is 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.

Ms. Stetson holds a BA in English Literature from Yale University, a 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.

Alicia Ely Yamin, JD MPH is the inaugural Director of  the Program on the Health Rights of Women and Children (the HRWC Program) at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, as well as Adjunct Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is also an Associated Senior Researcher at the Christian Michelsen Institute (Norway).

Yamin’s career in women’s and children’s health rights has spanned academia and civil society work in both the United States and the global South. She currently directs the HRWC Program from Tanzania, which facilitates greater fieldwork in East Africa. Previously, she had lived and worked on women’s and children’s health rights issues in Latin America for over a decade.

In 2007, Yamin was awarded the prestigious Joseph H. Flom Fellowship on Global Health and Human Rights at Harvard Law School,  which was  renewed until 2011. From 2008 to 2010, she also served as Special Adviser to Amnesty International’s Demand Dignity Campaign in relation to maternal health. Prior to that, Yamin was the Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights, where she oversaw all of the organization’s field investigations relating to maternal mortality, child wellbeing, and the right to health, as well as leading advocacy on those issues.

Yamin has drawn on both her legal and public health training to conceptualize and operationalize the linkages between maternal health and human rights since the mid-1990’s, when she was on the faculty of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and worked at a programmatic level with the Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program.

Yamin has published dozens of scholarly articles and several books relating to health and human rights, in both English and Spanish, and is recognized internationally for her work on reproductive and maternal health and human rights in particular. She has frequently testified before the United Nations on related subjects, and has worked with both governmental entities and civil society in efforts to enhance accountability for women’s and children’s health.

Currently, Yamin is one of ten expert members of the 2011 Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) Commitments Report Advisory Panel, which seeks to accelerate implementation of the United Nations Secretary General’s Global Strategy on Women’s and Children’s Health. She has also been appointed and is serving as an independent expert to the Constitutional Court of Colombia in respect of the implementation of its judgment T 760/08, which called for substantial restructuring of the Colombian health system.

Yamin is Chair of the Board of the Center for Economic and Social Rights. She also serves on the Reference Group of the International Budget Project-Partnership Initiative, as well as the Advisory Boards of the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights, the Center for Policy Analysis on Trade and Health, Operation Fistula, and several human rights organizations in Latin America. 

Yamin is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Watch Yamin's lecture Imagining a Different World: Reflections on What Applying a Human Rights Framework to Health Means and Why We Should Care

Lauren Bateman, MPH

Nick Cooper is the Field Study Coordinator for the FXB Center’s Haiti Child Protection Project. His work operates at the intersection of public health, child protection, field epidemiology, and the application of new technologies to humanitarian needs. He has served as a consultant to UNICEF’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Office, as a child protection officer in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake, and as a research associate for the Harvard Program on International Health and Human Rights. Mr. Cooper has also served as the Education Rights Officer and Chair of Union Council for the University of Queensland Union, and was the founding president of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Crisis Network. He has published on such topics as human rights, sustainable livelihoods, youth resilience, humanitarian human resources, and the Responsibility to Protect.  Mr. Cooper received his BA in International Relations and Islamic Studies from the University of Queensland, Australia, and his MS in Global Health and Population from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Kathryn Falb is program manager for the Health Rights of Women and Children (HRWC) program. Falb has previously worked on child marriage prevention programs in Uganda and managed health programs in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. Most recently, Falb conducted research as part of the Violence Against Women Research Team at the Harvard School of Public Health and continues to consult for international health and humanitarian organizations on data analysis and evaluation of gender-based violence programming. 

Falb holds a Master of Health Science degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she also completed a certificate program in Health and Human Rights. Currently, she is also working on her dissertation as a doctoral student in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Robyn Libson Gray is the Financial Associate at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Her role at the Center for the last seven years has been to help coordinate the financial and administrative processes of the Center. She graduated in 2000 from Colgate University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and women’s studies, and graduated with a master’s degree from the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at Lesley University in 2008. In addition to her work at the FXB Center, Ms. Gray has worked as a counselor at Respond, an agency for victims and survivors of domestic abuse, and as a counselor at the Wheelock College Counseling Center. She is currently working part time as a clinician at Somerville Mental Health, as part of the addictions team delivering treatment to opiate addicts. Her interests include the effects of trauma; processes of recovery, late adolescent development, addiction; and mental health issues and human rights.

Katrina Hann is program manager for the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPCGA). She has worked as a public policy consultant for the Lesotho-Boston Health Alliance, where she conducted a public health survey for the Lesotho Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, and as program coordinator for the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Hann holds a Master’s in Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex.

Jessica Moore Kaplan is managing director for Health and Human Rights: An International Journal. Throughout her career as a journalist and web producer, she has focused on digital content strategy, working with companies to improve their online presence and reach. 

Moore Kaplan spent five years as senior web producer for PBS’s nightly news program PBS NewsHour, where she led the production of news packages for the award-winning website. In 2004, she was senior web editor at  media watchdog group Media Matters for America, working with the newly launched organization to bring their reporting and web presence up to full capacity. In 2005 and 2006, she spearheaded the online production of U.S. News and World Report’s college and graduate school rankings. From 2007 to 2009, Moore Kaplan was managing editor of digital media at Sesame Workshop, the New York-based nonprofit that produces Sesame Street, Pinky Dinky Doo, and other educational children’s programming. While there, she managed content development for the Workshop's relaunching web presence, which won the 2009 Daytime Entertainment Emmy for New Approaches.

Most recently, Moore Kaplan was editor and publisher of Teen Voices, a social justice magazine created by teen girls from underrepresented communities. She worked with a small team to redesign and relaunch the print and online magazine, increasing the organization's visibility and readership.

Sarah Meyers-Ohki is the Faculty Assistant to Dr. Theresa Betancourt, Director of the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPCGA) at the FXB Center. She currently provides administrative and research support to Dr. Betancourt and to the RPCGA team, whose focus on cross-cultural mental health research is of special interest to Ms. Meyers-Ohki. In 2009, Ms. Meyers-Ohki received her Bachelor of Arts in French and Francophone Studies from Columbia University, where she also pursued a pre-medical curriculum. She is especially interested in maternal and child health, and hopes to achieve a medical degree in the near future.

Anne Stevenson is program manager for the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPCGA). Stevenson joined the FXB Center in 2011 after working as project coordinator at Partners Harvard Medical International (PHMI), where she managed international health care delivery and health consulting projects in India and Pakistan.

Prior to PHMI, Stevenson was HIV/AIDS intern at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Accra, Ghana. While there, she performed quality assessment of HIV/AIDS services at a 35,000+ person refugee settlement and coordinated 13 HIV/AIDS counselors on the camp. In this capacity, she spearheaded and organized HIV workshops on virus transmission, stigma and discrimination, and voluntary counseling and testing for UNHCR staff members and their dependents.

Stevenson holds a Master’s in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Meqdes Mesfin, MD, MPH

Bettina Stevens, MLitt

Ista Zahn, MA