Speaker bios

Amy Kapczynski
Amy Kapczynski received her J.D. from Yale Law School, her M.A. in Literature from Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and her M.Phil. in Sociology and Politics of Modern Society from Cambridge University, after receiving her A.B. in Politics and Women’s Studies from Princeton University. Amy originally co-founded Universities Allied for Essential Medicines with other students at Yale. In 2001, she led the efforts there that resulted in Yale negotiating with Bristol Myers Squibb to allow for generic competition in the market for stavudine in South Africa. She has clerked for the Supreme Court and on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Amy has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières, ACLU Women’s Right Project, East Bay Community Law Project, Lawyers Collective, HIV/AIDS Unit, and the Bard College Human Rights Project. Her primary research interests are in the interrelationship between HIV/AIDS, trade law, and international financial institutions; intellectual property law as it relates to HIV medicines for developing countries; and international human rights system failures in the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Dave Chokshi
Dave Chokshi is a second-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been involved with UAEM since 2004 and served on the Coordinating Committee during 2005-06. He was born and raised in Baton Rouge, graduated from Duke University in 2003, spent two years working with a malaria research consortium at Oxford University, and subsequently decided he needed to see what living in a big city was like.

Dai Ellis
Dai Ellis is a third-year law student at Yale and a Project Manager at the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, where he leads the Foundation’s work on achieving major price reductions for second-line AIDS medicines. Dai also co-directs Orphans of Rwanda, a non-profit that provides support to orphans and other vulnerable children who are pursuing a university education. Prior to his work at the Clinton Foundation, Dai worked at McKinsey and Company for several years before joining the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at Columbia University under Dr. Jeffrey Sachs. Dai’s work at Columbia took him to Rwanda, where he worked as the advisor to the Executive Director of the National AIDS Commission and helped to launch a national HIV/AIDS testing and treatment program.

Whitney Harrington
Graduated from Harvard in ‘04 with a degree in Neurobiology, now in the MD / PhD program at UW, working on my PhD in Pathobiology. I’m specifically looking at genetic diversity in malaria as a way to understand how different malaria strains affect clinical outcomes

Basit Khan
Basit is a third year undergraduate studying international health and development at UC Berkeley. He co-teaches a class on access to medicines in developing countries. This past summer, he was an intern at the Institute for OneWorld Health.

Amit Khera
Amit Khera is a second year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. As an undergraduate, he conducted neurobiological research on primate social cognition. He has since enrolled in Penn’s Global Health Scholar track - involving coursework and ongoing advocacy projects. This summer, Amit worked for the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, a nonprofit group seeking novel treatments for diseases primarily afflicting the global poor.

Hilary Marston
Hilary Marston is a second-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Before matriculating, she worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for three years, first as a research analyst on the global health team, and then as a special assistant to the CEO of the foundation, Patty Stonesifer. Prior to that, she was a management consultant for McKinsey & Company, working with a range of clients including pharmaceuticals companies and university health systems. At Penn, Hilary has worked with both the Global Health Interest Group and UAEM. She spent the summer in Zambia, interning with the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa (MACEPA).

Jonathan Soverow
A 4th year medical student at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine, Jonathan Soverow is currently pursuing a one-year MPH at the Harvard School of Public Health in quantitative methods. From 2000-2003, Mr. Soverow worked as a Program Assistant to Dr. Anthony So in the Health Equity Program at The Rockefeller Foundation, focusing on policy issues surrounding access to essential medicines, intellectual property rights, and tobacco control. He recently served as a coordinating committee member of UAEM, an AIDS Regional Action Coordinator for the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) (2003-04), and an Advisory Board Member of Essential Inventions, Inc. He previously worked for Ralph Nader at the Center for the Study of Responsive Law and graduated in 2000 from Princeton University, where he majored in Comparative Literature while completing premedical studies and editing The Progressive Review, a monthly, student-run magazine of political commentary.

Robynn Sturm
Robynn Sturm is a second year J.D. Candidate at Yale Law School. Before coming to law school, Robynn worked in India with the Self Employed Women’s Association and YUVA Consulting to develop advocacy agendas on various local and national government policies. This past summer, Robynn cut her teeth in Washington as a law clerk on Senator Leahy’s Judiciary Committee Staff.

Virginia Zaunbrecher
Virginia Zaunbrecher is a third-year law student at the University of California at Berkeley. Virginia’s studies focus on intellectual property law in the biotechnology sector, and this summer she worked in IP litigation and transactions for the law firm of Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson in its New York office. She has been a member of UAEM since spring 2005 and has served on the national Coordinating Committee since May of 2005. She is an associate editor for the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and is an advisor for the Journal’s Annual Review of Law and Technology. Virginia received her undergraduate degree in molecular biology and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she performed her undergraduate research on methyltransferases and epigenetic expression in maize.

Caroline Gallant
Caroline Gallant is a Ph.D. student at McGill University. Her studies focus on the human immune response to tuberculosis and leprosy. She has been a member of UAEM since Winter 2005 and the Coordinating Committee since Fall 2006. At McGill, she is a member of the senate committee overlooking technology transfer activities. She is also a member of the Global Treatment Access Group, a coalition of Canadian organizations working on access to medicine issues. Caroline received her undergraduate degree in biology from McGill and managed to visit all of McGill’s field stations in such locations as Barbados and the Arctic North. Two facts that Caroline has learned during her Ph.D. is that humans transmitted tuberculosis to cows, not the over way around, and that the only other host that leprosy infects is the armadillo.

Nick Stine
Nick Stine is a second-year medical student at Penn who has worked for several years on global health policy in Washington, DC, both on the NGO side as a medical intern with Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, and on the governmental side as a medical fellow for Congressman Henry Waxman’s Government Reform Committee. He is currently working with Congressman Waxman’s staff to gather congressional support for university initiatives to facilitate access in low-income countries.

Mike Hatch
A graduate of Duke University, and currently a second year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, Mike first became involved with UAEM chapter at Penn during its upstart in the fall of 2005. His “experience” in global health previously limited to reading, discussion, and viewing of documentaries, a trip to Central America in the summer of 2006 made tangible for him the disparity in human health worldwide. Most recently, Mike organized a Penn-wide Forum on University Innovations and Global Health — convening a panel of representatives from university administration, university-based research, the pharmaceutical industry, Health GAP, and UAEM to foster dialogue about what role Universities can play in addressing the access to medicines gap.

Michael Steffen
Michael Steffen is a 2L at Yale Law School, where he spends an inordinate amount of his time working on patent licensing and access to medicines issues, and not nearly enough on his classes. He serves on the Coordinating Committee of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines for the Yale chapter and the national movement. He spent last summer in Bangalore, India, drafting patent challenges to HIV/AIDS medicines and analyzing proposed “data exclusivity” rules. He also serves as a member of the Yale Law & Policy Review and assists with an undergraduate class on “Computers and the Law.” Prior to law school, Michael worked at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington D.C. There, Michael focused on copyright policy, spyware, and international Internet governance.

Stephanie Doan
Stephanie is a second year MPH student in the Global Health Department in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Her interest in access to medicines was developed during her time working in Treatment Adherence in a clinic in Rochester, NY and during several months spent in Southern Africa. She has been involved with UAEM for the last year, mostly working to sell the idea of humanitarian licensing to the university administration. When she isn’t writing her master’s thesis, doing UAEM, or reading for class, she may be found cycling around town, cooking up a storm in the kitchen or paddling a kayak through the waves.

Sonali Duggal
Sonali Duggal is a first year student at Harvard Business School. She spent the past two years with the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative in New Delhi, first helping to start up the India program, then working with generic pharmaceutical companies to reduce the price of treatment for second line and pediatric ARVs. Previously, Sonali was a consultant for Bain & Company in San Francisco, and before that spent a year as a Watson Fellow examining issues of organizing workers in the informal economy in South Africa, Ecuador, and Thailand.

Matthew Kavanagh
Matthew Kavanagh is the executive director of Global Justice, an organization dedicated to mobilizing a powerful movement of students and youth in the U.S. to promote socially and economically just solutions on global HIV/AIDS, trade, and child survival. As the National Coordinator of the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) at Global Justice, Matt previously coordinated a nation-wide network of youth AIDS activists and guided SGAC’s treatment access campaign focused on international trade and pharmaceutical company policies. Before coming to Global Justice, he worked with a wide variety of NGOs and social-movement organizations, most recently in South Africa, where he worked on water rights and apartheid reparations campaigns. Matt was a community organizer with the Boston Youth Organizing Project, directed a national juvenile justice/foster care legal education program at Street Law, organized for people-focused international development and trade policies with groups including the Mobilization for Global Justice, and coordinated education programs in Massachusetts, New York, Guatemala, and Namibia. His has written articles for Z Magazine, Clamor Magazine, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism and other publications, as well as curricula for young people on issues ranging from US family law to the practices of the World Bank and IMF. Matt holds a Bachelors Degree in comparative politics and women’s studies from Vassar College and a Masters Degree in community education and organizing from Harvard University, where he studied transnational youth activism. Originally from upstate New York, Matt has lived in Washington, DC on and off for the last five years.

Matt Price
Matt is a recent graduate of The College of William and Mary, where he studied Biology and Biochemistry. As an undergraduate, he conducted neuroscience research on the evolutionary physiology of reproductive seasonality, schizophrenia pathophysiology, and neuronal fate determination. He has been involved with UAEM since Spring 2005 and has served on the Coordinating Committee from Fall 2005-present. He will soon join the Program on Global Health and Technology Access at Duke University.