Editors

Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and has undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer is the Presley Professor of Social Medicine and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital; and the United Nations Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti, under Special Envoy Bill Clinton.

Dr. Farmer and his colleagues in the US and in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, and Malawi have pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings. Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health human rights, and the consequences of social inequality. His most recent book is Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader. Other titles include Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor; The Uses of Haiti; Infections and Inequalities; The Modern Plagues; and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Dr. Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, Executive Editor, Critical Concepts

Alicia Ely Yamin is currently the Joseph H. Flom Fellow on Global Health and Human Rights at Harvard Law School, Adjunct Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Senior Associated Researcher at the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. She also serves as Special Advisor to Amnesty International’s global campaign on poverty and human rights: Demand Dignity (in particular, in relation to the right to maternal health).

Before beginning at Harvard Law School in September, 2007, Yamin was the Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights, where she oversaw all of the organization’s field investigations. Yamin has conducted human rights documentation and advocacy with both international and local Latin American organizations for twenty years. She is internationally recognized as a leader in the conceptualization and implementation of rights-based approaches to health, has published dozens of scholarly articles and several books relating to health and human rights in both English and Spanish, and has been awarded multiple honors and distinctions in respect of her work on health and human rights, and in particular her work on maternal health.

Yamin is Chair of the Board of the Center for Economic and Social Rights. In addition, she serves on the Reference Group of the International Budget Partnership-Partnership Initiative, as well as the advisory boards of the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights and the Center for Policy Analysis on Trade and Health, and several human rights advocacy organizations in Latin America. 

Yamin has served as Executive Editor of Health and Human Rights from 2007 to 2010 and continues to serve as an Contributing Editor. She is also a member of the editorial boards of Human Rights Quarterly, Human Rights and the Global Economy, and the Revista Iberoamericana de Derechos Humanos.

Evan Lyon, MD, Executive Editor, Health and Human Rights in Practice

Evan Lyon focuses on community-based approaches to HIV and TB treatment, providing primary care in resource-poor settings, and management of chronic disease using community health workers. He has worked in Haiti since 1996.

Dr. Lyon received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 2003 and completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2007. He is currently a hospitalist on the faculty of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an Associate Physician at the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities, and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, where he advises residents in Global Health. Between 2008 and 2009, Dr. Lyon provided medical care and advocacy for prisoners in rural Alabama. Following the Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010, he has provided direct medical care, through Partners-in-Health/Zanmi Lasante, to patients at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

Beyond working to provide care in poor communities, Dr. Lyon’s research and advocacy work has focused on economic, social, and political inequality, the health consequences of war and political violence with particular emphasis on the Iraq war, the right to health, and popular, community-based responses to global health problems. After July 1, 2010, Dr. Lyon's role on the journal will shift to that of Contributing Editor, with increased focus on direct patient care and teaching in Haiti.

Arlan Fuller, Executive Editor, Health and Human Rights in Practice

FXB Center 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, where he worked with that Taiwanese-American organization and the Taiwanese government in coordinating their legislative efforts in the U.S. 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. After July 1, 2010, Mr. Fuller will be leaving his editorial role on the journal to direct the FXB Center's Haiti Child Protection Assessment project and will continue to serve as the FXB Center's Policy Director.

Alexander Irwin, PhD, Contributing Editor

Alexander Irwin is an ethicist and public health policy analyst whose primary areas of work include: (1) HIV/AIDS policy; (2) the underlying social and political determinants of health; and (3) human-rights based approaches to health. After completing a PhD in the philosophy of religion in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Irwin taught for four years as an Assistant Professor at Amherst College. In 2002, Irwin left Amherst to work full time under Dr. Jim Kim at the Boston-based health charity Partners In Health and subsequently at the World Health Organization, Geneva. In 2003, as a member of the Transition Team for incoming WHO Director-General LEE Jong-wook, Irwin contributed to the preparation of the new Director-General’s global health leadership agenda. Subsequently, Irwin accepted an offer to remain at WHO in the Department of Equity, Poverty and Social Determinants of Health (EIP/EQH), where he served as a member of the technical secretariat of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health. While at WHO, Irwin was a principal writer on two World Health Reports: WHR 2003: Shaping the future, and WHR 2004: HIV/AIDS: Changing history. He was also a member of the Task Force which drafted WHO's eleventh General Programme of Work (GPW), the organization's principal long-range planning document, covering the period 2007–2015. Irwin contributed in particular to drafting the sections of the GPW dealing with health equity, the social determinants of health and an ethical framework for global public health. Irwin became Associate Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights in 2006. Between 2007 and 2009, he served the journal as Managing Editor, Co-Managing Editor, and advised the Executive Editors with a particular focus on health and human rights in practice. He presently continues to serve as a consultant in a number of global health and education initiatives while pursuing a nursing degree in New York City.
   

Susan R. Holman, MS, PhD, Managing Editor

Susan Holman is an academic writer and editor with dual training in public health nutrition and responses to poverty in history. She received her M.S. degree in nutrition from the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts, completing a clinical internship at Frances Stern Nutrition Center, Tufts-New England Medical Center. As a public health and clinical nutritionist in Boston’s South End, Roxbury, and at Joslin Diabetes Center, she specialized in maternal-child health. Intrigued by how faith-based ideologies shape attitudes to poverty, nutrition, and health choices, she completed a master’s degree at Harvard Divinity School to explore these issues more globally and historically, receiving her PhD from Brown University. She is the author of three academic textbooks, two by Oxford University Press, editor of a fourth academic volume, and has also published numerous articles and contributed chapters. Opting out of the traditional academic teaching track, she chose to focus her career on poverty and human rights research and academic writing and editing. She joined the FXB Center in 2008 in a short move from the Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She previously served as managing and associate editor for several academic journals. At FXB, she has contributed to the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS (JLICA) as a writer/editor for Learning Group 3, "Expanding Access to Services and Protecting Human Rights," and on several other projects. Among the research and writing projects that compel her free time, she is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on health and human rights issues as they relate to faith-based organizations.