WHO WE ARE
Faculty, Staff, and Affiliates
Faculty
Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MSc, Director of Research
Jacqueline Bhabha is a Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, 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 Right”s 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, ScD, MA, Director, Research Program on Children and Global Adversity
Theresa Betancourt, ScD, MA, is Associate 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 François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, where she directs the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPGCA). Her central research interests include 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. Her research on resilience in children and families facing adversity is particularly aligned with examining consequences due to the two exceptions to recent improvements in child health globally: regions affected by armed conflict and regions affected by HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Betancourt is the Principal Investigator of an ongoing longitudinal study of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone (2002-present) and is leading a mixed-methods study in Rwanda to develop and test family-strengthening interventions for HIV/AIDS-affected children. In 2004-2005, Dr. Betancourt served as Co-PI of a randomized controlled trial of Group Interpersonal Therapy for the treatment of depression among war-affected adolescents in northern Uganda. In 2007, Dr. Betancourt was 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. With this support, she is also conducting field research in Boston to assess mental health service needs and preferences among Somali Bantu refugees in the Boston metropolitan area. Dr. Betancourt’s research in India has involved collaboration with local NGOs such as Mobile Creches and FXB India and has focused on holistic models for analyzing child protection threats as well as tools for ensuring child-friendly infrastructure development projects.
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 has written extensively on the mental health of children in adversity including recent articles in Child Development, The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Social Science and Medicine.
Nancy Cott, PhD, Member, FXB Faculty Steering Committee
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, JD, MPH, Research Associate
Sarah Dougherty is a research associate supporting a range of projects relating to the health and human rights of children and youth, including the Roma Adolescent Agency Initiative. Prior to joining the FXB Center, she worked for the Institute of Justice and Democracy in Haiti on its prison health advocacy and housing initiatives. She has also worked in the Domestic Violence Unit of the DC Courts and at the American Political Science Association’s Congressional Fellowship Program. She holds a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law and a Master of Public Health from Tufts University School of Medicine.
Arlan Fuller, JD, MA, Executive Director
Executive 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 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.
Orla Kelly, MA, MBA, Research Associate
Orla Kelly is a Research Associate supporting Jacqueline Bhabha on her Gender and Adolescent Agency portfolio in India. Her research focuses primarily on access to education and gender empowerment. She joined the FXB Center in May 2010. Her previous experience includes research work with Human Rights Law Network, New Delhi and Google, Ireland. She holds a Masters in Human Rights Law and an MBA from University College Dublin.
Judith Palfrey, MD, FAAP, Member, FXB Faculty Steering Committee
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, PhD, DDes, Member, FXB Faculty Steering Committee
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.
Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, Director, Program on the Health Rights of Women and Children
Alicia Yamin is a Lecturer on Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is also the inaugural Director of the Program on the Health Rights of Women and Children at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, which she currently directs from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Ms. Yamin is also an Associated Senior Researcher at the Christian Michelsen Institute (Norway).
Ms. Yamin’s 20-year career at the intersection of health, human rights, and development has bridged academia and activism. From 2007 to 2011, Ms. 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.
Ms. 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, and she was appointed as an independent expert by the Colombian Constitutional Court in 2011 in relation to the implementation of a major judgment that restructured the health system.
Ms. Yamin provided expert input into the UN Secretary General’s Global Strategy on Women’s and Children’s Health (2010), and served on the Advisory Panel for the 2011 Partnership for Maternal Newborn and Child Health Commitments Report. She currently serves on the WHO Steering Group relating to Evidence of Impact of Rights-Based Approaches to Women’s and Children’s Health and the WHO-led initiative on equity in achieving universal health care.
Ms. Yamin is Chair of the Board of the Center for Economic and Social Rights. She also serves on the Executive Committee of Beyond 2015, the largest civil society coalition advocating for an inclusive and pro-equity future development agenda, and the Reference Group of the International Budget Project-Partnership Initiative. She is also on the Advisory Boards of the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights, the Center for Policy Analysis on Trade and Health, and several human rights organizations in Latin America.
Ms. Yamin is a graduate of Harvard College (summa cum laude), Harvard Law School (cum laude), and the Harvard School of Public Health, where she received both the Samdperil and François-Xavier Bagnoud Awards upon graduation.
Fellows
Heather Adams, MA, ALB
Heather Adams’ 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 in the community. Prior to joining the FXB Center, she was a Fellow at Harvard’s University Committee on Human Rights Studies (UCHR) where she worked with the university’s Scholars at Risk Program (SAR). Ms. Adams continues this work serving on 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 (ASD).
Ms. Adams holds a Master of Studies in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University.
Sudhir Anand, PhD, Distinguished Visiting Scholar
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.
Professor Anand is Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health and for the past several years Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. During his years at Harvard as visiting or adjunct professor, he served as Acting Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies from 1997-1999, where he led a research initiative exploring the theory and measurement of health equity. Professor Anand recently chaired the WHO committee on global health systems performance assessment.
He received his M.A. in mathematics and D.Phil. in economics from the University of Oxford.
Jeannie Annan, PhD
Bio pending
Lara Antkowiak, MD, Med
Bio pending
Satchit Balsari, MD, MPH
Dr. 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 application of smart technology to advance public health. Committed to global health education, Dr. 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. Dr. Balsari’s signature initiatives include project EMcounter (a customizable, portable, digital surveillance tool, the latest iteration of which, was utilized at the world’s largest mass gathering – the Kumbh Mela in India); the Voices project (a crowd-sourced, on-line disaster response analysis tool deployed after the terrorist attacks and natural disasters in India and the US); and city-wide disaster drills in India and Sri Lanka, that are now adopted by the National Disaster Management Authority of India.
Educated at Grant Medical College, Mumbai, the Harvard School of Public Health, and at Columbia and Cornell’s NewYork-Presbyterian Emergency Medicine Residency Program, Dr. Balsari is currently Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, Associate Faculty at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. He is also an Asia 21 Fellow at the Asia Society.
Bilgé Ögün Bassani, Senior Fellow and Visiting Scientist
Bio pending
Christopher Carpenter, MD, MPH
Christopher Carpenter is a Pediatric Global Health Fellow with Boston Children’s who has worked in the DR Congo, East Timor and Liberia. He is currently working at St. Mark’s Hospital in Haiti, where he is improving pediatric care by training local doctors and nurses. During his fellowship, he developed and piloted a nursing apprenticeship program in advanced neonatal nursing care at San Nicholas Hospital in St. Marc, Haiti. The program paired two nursing leaders with US-based nursing mentors, and developed and implemented a curriculum to train them in advanced neonatal care. He was able to help produce two exceptional neonatal nurses who can now become neonatal nurse educators throughout Haiti.
Hilarie Cranmer, MD, MPH
Bio pending
Gregg Greenough, MD, MPH
Bio pending
Elizabeth Gibbons, MA
Elizabeth D. Gibbons is currently a Senior Fellow and Visiting Scientist at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights in the Harvard School of Public Health and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance at St. Edwards University. Prior to these 2011 academic appointments, Gibbons enjoyed a lengthy career in the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), where she served most recently as Deputy Director, 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.
Lynne Jones, OBE, MRCPsych., PhD
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. 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. She is currently working as the adviser in early child development for the Aga Khan Foundation in Northern Mozambique. In 2001, she was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for her mental health work in conflict-affected areas of Central Europe.
Siddharth Kara, JD, MBA
Siddharth Kara is a Visiting Scientist and Fellow on Forced Labor with the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights 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 from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.
Mike Lappi, MPH, MS, DO, PhD
Bio pending
Jay Lemery, MD, FACEP FAWM
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. Dr. Lemery is a Consultant to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Climate and Health Program, and a Visiting Scientist at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Joia Mukherjee, MD, MPH
Bio pending
Catherine Panter-Brick, PhD
Bio pending
Rakesh Rajani, MTS
Bio pending
Mary C. Smith-Fawzi, ScD
Bio pending
Pamela Steiner, EdD, MA
Dr. Pamela Steiner is a Fellow with the FXB Center, 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), Dr. 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.
Dr. 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.
Anne Stetson, JD, MA, Senior Fellow and Visiting Scientist
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.
Ms. 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. 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.
Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH
Dr. 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 thirty countries affected by war and disaster, including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, North Korea, Darfur-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. Domestically, Dr. VanRooyen has 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 twenty physicians from the Harvard system to hurricane-devastated regions.
Staff
Vanessa Boulanger, MSc, Program Manager
Vanessa Boulanger is the Program Manager for the Health Rights of Women and Children (HRWC) Program. Her work is situated at the intersection of research, policy, advocacy, and public health practice with a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Previously, she has worked with community health workers to increase knowledge, access, and utilization of HIV health services in Namibia; conducted community-based assessments and advocated for donor funding in the Philippines; developed curricula, lead training sessions, and evaluated the impact of a peer educator program for women in Vietnam; and measured The Cost of Inaction, a study conducted at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights on the consequences of a failure to address the social and economic needs of children affected by HIV/AIDS.
Ms. Boulanger received a MSc in Global Health and Population from the Harvard School of Public Health with a focus on Women, Gender, and Health and a BA in International Development and Social Change with a focus on Women and Gender Studies from Clark University. She also completed an intensive training program at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis GIS Institute.
Rebecca Cantor, MPH, MSW, Program Coordinator
Rebecca Cantor is the Program Coordinator for the Health Rights of Women and Children (HRWC) Program. Prior to joining HRWC, Cantor facilitated coalition-building with pregnant and parenting teens and their providers in Massachusetts, conducted research on the social justice implications of culturally relevant care at Boston Medical Center, and drafted policy related to LGBT and immigrant health at the Boston Public Health Commission. Cantor received an MPH in Maternal and Child Health from the Boston University School of Public Health, an MSW in Macro Social Work from the Boston University School of Social Work, and a BA in History from Vassar College.
Greta Cuko, Administrative Coordinator
Greta Cuko is the Administrative Coordinator for the FXB Center. She works closely with the Senior Grants Manager and Executive Director in processing financial statements as well as conducting administrative duties for the Center.
Greta graduated from Boston College with a degree in Communications and concentration in Public Relations.
Katrina Hann, MA, Program Manager
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.
Grace Lilienthal, Program Assistant
Grace Lilienthal is the Program Assistant for the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPCGA), directed by Dr. Theresa Betancourt. Prior to joining the RPCGA team, Ms. Lilienthal spent eight months in Rwanda working on development and post-genocide reconciliation efforts. She has served with organizations promoting the health and thriving of children and youth in China, El Salvador, Singapore, and in low-resource and school settings in the United States.
Ms. Lilienthal holds a BS in Child Development and Political Science from Vanderbilt University. Her interests include risk and resilience in populations facing multiple forms of adversity, mental health services research, and developmental psychology.
Angela Murray, Faculty Assistant
Angela Murray is the faculty assistant to Center Director Professor Jennifer Leaning and Director for Research Professor Jacqueline Bhabha. Angela comes to the Center from the Harvard College Freshman Dean’s Office, where she was the Assistant to the Resident Deans of Freshman and the Director of Freshman Programming.
Angela holds a BA in Psychology and minor in Global Health from Cornell University. She did her field work on maternal and child health in Zambia.
Jessica Moore-Kaplan, Managing Director
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 news providers and non-profits to improve their online presence, reach, and efficacy.
Ms. Moore-Kaplan was senior web producer for PBS’s nightly news program PBS NewsHour, where she led the production of multimedia news stories. While there, she won two Scripps Howard Awards for Excellence in Web Reporting and a South Asian Journalists Association Award. She was senior web editor at Media Matters for America, working with the then-fledgling media watchdog group to bring their reporting and web presence up to full capacity. As senior producer for U.S. News and World Report, Moore-Kaplan managed education coverage for USNews.com, planning and executing education-related news packages, including the publication’s college and graduate school rankings. Moore-Kaplan has also acted as editor and publisher of Teen Voices, a magazine and mentoring program focusing on media literacy for girls. She was previously managing editor of digital media at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street and other educational children’s programming. While there, she strategized content approaches for the Workshop’s relaunching website, for which the team won the 2009 Daytime Entertainment Emmy for New Approaches.
Arathi Ravichandran, MSc, Project Manager
Arathi Ravichandran is the Project Manager for the SAFE Child Protection Initiative. She currently manages the development and implementation of a new set of monitoring and evaluation tools utilizing the SAFE framework to assess major threats to child protection in numerous settings in India, Sierra Leone, and Haiti. Her work is situated at the intersection of research, policy, advocacy, and public health practice with a focus on child rights. Previously, Arathi worked with indigenous Mayan women in rural Guatemala on small-business ventures focused on improving access to basic health related products for vulnerable children and families in the rural Western Highland region of Guatemala; mental health service utilization and treatment among children facing the onset of blindness at the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India; mental health needs assessment of Somali Bantu Refugee Youth living in the greater Boston area; and a study focused on the inter-generational transmission of trauma between mothers and infants at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Arathi received a MSc in Society, Human Development, and Health from the Harvard School of Public Health with a focus on Maternal and Child Health, and a BA in Economics and International Affairs at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
Bonnie Shnayerson, Communications Coordinator
Bonnie Shnayerson is the Communications Coordinator for the FXB Center, where she handles communications, marketing, and outreach efforts.
Prior to her role as Communications Coordinator, she served as the Executive Assistant to Center Director Jennifer Leaning and Director of Research Jacqueline Bhabha. Before joining the FXB Center, she was the Managing Editor of Publications for the Asian University for Women Support Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the development of a liberal arts women’s university in Bangladesh.
She received her BA in English and Diplomatic History from the University of Pennsylvania.
Jane Shuma, Research Coordinator
Jane Shuma is research coordinator for the Program on the Health Rights of Women and Children (HRWC), and is responsible for coordinating field work activities for the study titled Impact of Maternal Deaths on Living Children.
Ms. Shuma holds an LLB degree from the University of Notre Dame Australia and an MA in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Netherlands. Her career experience evolved as a legal officer with the Legal and Human Rights Centre, a local NGO in Tanzania. While there, she headed an advocacy program on human rights awareness and a project to end female genital mutilation. Ms. Shuma has also worked as a program coordinator for advocacy and communication at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Ms. Shuma is an active member of Tanzania Women Lawyers Association, where she served as vice chairperson from 2008 -2010. She is based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Jonathan Starke, Senior Grants Manager
Jonathan Starke is the senior grants manager for the department and handles day to day financial transactions and account maintenance as well as grant submissions and administration. Starke earned his B.A. in public policy and administration at Northeastern University in Boston. He has previously worked at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital performing grant and fund related work. He is currently pursuing a Masters in Psychology.
Ista Zahn, MA
Bio pending
Affiliates
Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith
William Beardslee, MD
Mihir Bhatt, MS
Chris Desmond, PhD
Sheri Fink, MD, PhD
Nathan Hansen, PhD
Sara Stulac, MD, MPH
Stephen P. Marks, LLD, Dipl. IHEI
Carmel Williams, PhD
Doctoral Students
Ryan McBain
Carmel Salhi
Pamela Scorza
Post-Doctoral Researchers
Elizabeth Newnham, PhD
Bio pending
Lauren Ng, PhD
Lauren Ng is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity. Her work focuses on the psychological impact of war, conflict, and daily hardships on children and families, risk and resilience factors in child and adolescent global mental health, and the development and assessment of culturally-appropriate evidence-based interventions for trauma and its correlates. Dr. Ng is currently working with Dr. Betancourt to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of a family-based prevention intervention for children affected by HIV/AIDS in rural Rwanda. Dr. Ng received a National Institutes of Mental Health diversity research supplement grant to support her fellowship at the FXB Center.
Dr. Ng completed her doctorate in Clinical Psychology with a Child/Family Concentration at the University of Southern California (USC) in 2012. Her dissertation analyzed the complex associations between genocide experiences, post-genocide risk factors, and mental health in orphaned survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and was awarded the 2012 American Psychological Association Division 52 Student International Research Award. Dr. Ng graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Yale University in 2004, received her MA in Clinical Psychology from USC in 2008, and completed her predoctoral clinical internship with a specialty in Trauma Psychology at USC-Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities in 2012.
Margareta Matache, PhD
Margareta Matache is a Romanian Roma human rights activist who joined the FXB Center as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in September 2012.
She has worked on Roma and minorities issues since 1999 in various local, national and international environments. From 2005 to 2012, Dr. Matache was the Executive Director of Romani CRISS (www.romanicriss.org), a leading Roma NGO that defends and promotes the rights of Roma. Her work at Romani CRISS persevered in promoting Roma people as citizens with full rights. Notably, Romani CRISS was a leader in catalyzing the Ministry of Education’s order to ban school segregation of Roma students.
Previously, Dr. Matache served as a youth worker, trainer or as a short-term observer for several OSCE/ODIHR missions in Balkan countries. She has also coordinated and participated in the implementation of multiple regional European projects, including “Roma and the Stability Pact in South-Eastern Europe” and “Roma use your ballot wisely,” of the OSCE/ODIHR.
She completed her doctoral research work in early childhood development of Roma children at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest in 2012. Dr. Matache holds a Master’s degree in European Social Policies and a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Bucharest.
Research Assistants & Interns
Jason Korta
