Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH
Co-Director, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Professor of the Practice of Global Health,
Harvard School of Public Health
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
From 1999 to 2005, Dr. Leaning directed the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, during which time she also served as Editor-in-Chief of Medicine & Global Survival, an international quarterly. She is a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and the Center for International Development and 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 Physicians for Human Rights (an organization she co-founded), Amnesty International, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Oxfam America, International Rescue Committee, The Humane Society of the United States, and the Massachusetts Bay Chapter of the American Red Cross. She is Visiting Editor of the British Medical Journal, serves on the editorial board of Health and Human Rights, and is a member of the Board of Syndics at Harvard University Press. She teaches disaster management, human rights, and public health and policy response to humanitarian crises and has authored 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 and 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 U.K. One of the first to identify the conflict in Darfur as genocide after her extensive field investigations, Dr. Leaning has 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 A.B. 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 M.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH, FACEP
Co-Director, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Director, Division of International Health and Humanitarian Programs,
Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health and Population,
Harvard School of Public Health
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. VanRooyen 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.
Dr. VanRooyen teaches courses on humanitarian operations in war at the Harvard School of Public Health. His textbook, Emergency Field Medicine, is considered one of the key reference texts in this area, and he has authored over 50 publications related to international emergency medicine development and humanitarian assistance. Dr. VanRooyen has served on numerous advisory panels and boards, including International Rescue Committee, the National Academies/GAO evaluation of mortality studies in Darfur, and is chairman of the Humanitarian Action Summit. Dr. VanRooyen has also been awarded the Reader's Digest Health Heroes Award, the Raoul Wallenburg Foundation Humanitarian Award, the Hippocrates Society Humanitarian Award and the AMA Pride in the Profession Award. He was given the University of Illinois Alumni Humanitarian Award and was featured as one of two US physicians in the American Medical Association's publication entitled Caring Physicians of the World.