Alicia Ely Yamin

Alicia Ely Yamin, JD MPH is a Lecturer on Law and Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Director of the JD/MPH program, Policy Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, and a Global Fellow at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Her latest book, Power, Suffering and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks and Why They Matter, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016.

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. In 2011, she was named to serve 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.

Recently Yamin served on the steering committee for the WHO project and monograph on “Evidence of Impact of Rights-based Approaches to Health” as well as the Task Force for the WHO consultative report “Making Fair Choices on the Path to Universal Health Coverage.”

She currently serves on the Lancet-O’Neil Institute Commission on Global Health and the Law, the UN Secretary General’s Independent Accountability Panel for Every Woman Every Child and the Global Strategy for Women's Children's and Adolescents' Health (2016-2030); and the Expert Group of the UN High Level Commission on Health Sector Employment and Economic Growth. She is also the 2015-16 Visiting Gladstein Professor of Human Rights 2015-16, at the University of Connecticut.