Maya Babu

Maya is a fifth-year MD/MBA candidate at Harvard Medical School/Harvard Business School. She has worked at the Department of Health and Human Services, and served in leadership roles with the Committee on Legislation and Advocacy of the American Medical Association, Association of Women Surgeons, and Massachusetts Medical Society’s Committee on Legislation. As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, she studied the developmental effects of iron deficiency on learning and memory. More recently at the Department of Healthcare Policy at Harvard Medical School, she has been examining the impact of welfare reform on access to treatment for women with serious mental illness.  During her fellowship, Maya will study the socioeconomic factors that underlie patient transfers to a Level I Trauma Center.

Charlotte Harrison

Charlotte is a graduate of Harvard Law School and also holds degrees in public health and religion from Harvard. She is currently a candidate for PhD in Religion at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences where she is writing a doctoral dissertation that explores questions of collective responsibility and governance in organ transplantation.  Her research interests include the law and ethics of organ transplantation; the ethics of professional collaboration when collaborators abide by differing moral standards; the respective roles of individual doctors, the public and intermediate institutions such as hospitals and professional organizations in determining the ethics of medical practice. Charlotte is also interested in the intersections of bioethics with intellectual property law, which was her main area of practice before returning to grad school to study ethics.

Blaine Saito

Blaine is a joint degree candidate in law and public policy at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. His research interest centers on the intersection of taxation and health policy.  In particular, his work will examine how the tax code effectively or ineffectively manages our health care financing system.  Blaine also has more general interests in tax and health care financing.

Faina Shalts

Faina is a student at Harvard Law School interested in bioethics, international health, and access to health care. She graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2006 as a double major in Ethnic Studies and Political Science and completed an Ethnic Studies honors thesis on Russian Jewish immigrants’ experience with health care in America as compared to other immigrant groups. During her fellowship, Faina plans to research the structural, legal, and ethical position of the World Health Organization (WHO) in preventing and containing pandemics, as well as the effectiveness of an organization like the WHO in dealing with global health crises.  The structural, legal, and ethical questions raised by the recent spread of H1N1, or “Swine Flu,” will form the crux of Faina’s inquiry into the national and global mechanisms at play when pandemics occur.

Ariane Tschumi

Ariane is a joint JD/MPH student Harvard Law School and Harvard School of Public Health focusing on issues of global health. Her research interests lie in health care delivery, early childhood and preventable diseases, maternal mortality, and the use of litigation as a strategy for realizing the right to health. Her fellowship research will assess a right to health care for the poor in the United States through judicial analogy. By comparing arguments that the US Supreme Court has made to incrementalize a limited right to health care for certain populations with the particular burdens placed on the poor through the structural determinants of poverty, Ariane seeks to demonstrate that a right to health care for the poor may not be as "radical" as it first appears.

Yuanhen
Wang

Yuanheng, or Sally, is a joint JD/MPH student Harvard Law School and Harvard School of Public Health.  Her area of research interest is in legal and regulatory mechanisms to improve the healthcare system. In particular, delivery of essential medicines, eliminating systematic inefficiencies and reducing healthcare costs, and creating incentives for more research in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical device industries are topics of special interest. Presently, Sally is working on a paper on the property and economic incentives involved with pharmaceutical marketing and the effects that an improved regulatory regime would have in this area. Another area Sally is studying is the public health effects of court decisions, such as Wyeth vs. Levine.