The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator is thrilled to announce 2018-19 Senior Scholar in Residence, Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH. Professor Yamin is an Adjunct Lecturer on Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Visiting Professor of Law at the Georgetown University School of Law. Professor Yamin is known globally for her scholarship and advocacy in the realm of economic and social rights, the right to health, and sexual and reproductive health rights.
With an unflinching approach to assessing the potential and limitation of applying rights to complex, uncharted health issues, Professor Yamin has built her career at the intersection of law, health, and human rights. After receiving her JD from Harvard Law School, Yamin worked in human rights law from Mexico to India, where she became increasingly drawn to economic and social rights, specifically health and gender inequalities as a crucial dimension of human rights. There, she began to form the perspective that “the key to why human rights is important to global health is that people don’t have a chance to exercise the same choices over their lives or bodies because of completely arbitrary and unfair characteristics.” This perspective set the stage for her trailblazing career in health and human rights.
Yamin went on to pursue an MPH at the Harvard Chan School, and shortly thereafter assumed a role on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Here, her work around maternal health began to crystallize when she partnered with Deborah Maine, a world-renowned expert in international women’s health. Yamin’s approach – rooted as firmly in years of grassroots fieldwork as academic scholarship – was a ripple in a global health tidal shift, one that was beginning to recognize maternal health and universal access to obstetric care as a fundamental right. She recalls those in the community who doubted this, and her persistence: “You’re never going to be able to establish an affirmative entitlement to emergency obstetric care. I didn’t believe that.”
Post-Columbia, Professor Yamin became Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), and later began teaching and directing policy advocacy at the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard Chan School. With PHR, she worked to further an agenda that would build up the legitimacy of advocacy and scholarship around economic and social rights, and developed programs for the right to health in conflict zones, as well as maternal health. While determined to fiercely pursue this agenda, she maintained a pragmatic strategy: “Social change is an iterative process, anything that happens overnight has the potential for instability.” In the wake of new constitutions, she immediately saw the potential as well as challenges to carving out an enforceable right to health. She initiated a ground-breaking course at Harvard Chan School to train practitioners from around the globe in how to deploy legal mobilization and litigation in ways that enhanced health equity.
Professor Yamin was a perfect fit for GHELI’s framework. “My entire career has been shaped around pursuing very complex problems in global health – those which are also systemic injustices – and require multidisciplinary approaches and solution. The work that GHELI does to disseminate this knowledge to people who use it as an opportunity to change the way they think about global health.” Her residency will focus on addressing what she considers to be the most pervasive and pressing global health challenges: the origination and manifestation of gross inequalities on health outcomes, and reproductive health rights.
Prior to her formal residency this fall, Professor Yamin joined GHELI in 2017 and early 2018 to film a series on the fundamentals of Human Rights and Health, as well as various testimonies for international policy development.
In addition to her work in higher education, Professor Yamin currently serves as a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Global Health and the Law, and the Lancet Commission on Arctic Health. Her latest book is Power, Suffering and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter, with a foreword by Paul Farmer (UPenn, 2016; in Spanish, UniAndes, 2018).