AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

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Report on Science and Human Rights

Summer 2006 Vol XXVI, No. 1

Staff Notes

New Staff Member

Jana Asher joined SHR in February of this year. She is a Senior Program Associate for both the Project on Science and Intellectual Property in the Public Interest and the Science and Human Rights Program. Her past work has included the design and implementation of a national survey on human rights abuses in Sierra Leone, technical advice towards a national survey of human rights abuses in East Timor, design of the stratification and modeling for an analysis of data for Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), and development of the statistical methods for estimating the death counts outlined in a report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Prior to work in human rights data collection and analysis, Jana was an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, where she worked for both the Administrative Records Research Group and also the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Japanese Studies from Wellesley College, and a M.S. in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, and is completing a Ph.D. in Statistics with an Emphasis on Human Rights under the guidance of Professor Stephen E. Fienberg at Carnegie Mellon University.

SHR in the News

The work of staff member Jana Asher was highlighted in the July 21st issue of Science. In a three page News Focus written by Robin Mejia, Jana's 2004 work in Sierra Leone – where she led a national survey on human rights abuses experienced during the 1991-2000 armed internal conflict – is lauded for its ground-breaking advances in multicultural survey methodology. Also mentioned in the article is a current SHR project in which Jana's data are being used in the creation of a humanitarian-oriented report on the current situation in Sierra Leone.

Jana Asher also participated as an invited speaker in the May 2006 Conference on Research Use of Patented Inventions, sponsored by The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM) and the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with support from the European Patent Office (EPO). Her talk unveiled preliminary results for the United States from a multi-national survey undertaking by SIPPI, and her comments were published in a May 18th news story by Intellectual Property Watch and in the June 5th Weekly News of Managing Intellectual Property.

SIPPI Project Director Contributing to Report Series

The Center for the Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research and Management (MIHR) has invited SHR staff member Stephen Hansen to revise two of his publications for use in their upcoming handbook on intellectual property management. The publications to be revised are "Facilitating Humanitarian Access to Pharmaceutical and Agricultural Innovation," coauthored with Amanda Brewster and Audrey Chapman and published by Innovation Strategy Today, and Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual and Options for Traditional Knowledge Holders in Protecting their Intellectual Property and Maintaining Biological Diversity, coauthored with Justin Van Fleet and released as a AAAS publication.

SIPPI Staff Member Invited to Present Research

SIPPI Program Associate Mike Kisielewski will be presenting a research paper at the 2006 Northeastern Political Science Meeting in Boston, MA. The meeting will be held from November 9-11. Mike will discuss the findings of a paper he is preparing on the international biodiversity regime and its relationship to food sovereignty — a theme that SIPPI has been studying. This will be an excellent opportunity to present the work of SHR-SIPPI and its relationship to the social sciences.