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Current Staff | Staff Emereti
| Former Interns
Jana Asher
Jana Asher (2002-2003; 2005-2007) left the program in order to focus on completing her dissertation. Her early work for AAAS included statistical consultation on projects for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As a Senior Program Associate, she was involved in several initiatives, including the SHR Program's casework activities on behalf of persecuted scientists, engineers, and health professionals through the AAAS Human Rights Action Network (AAASHRAN) and organization of SHR events. She served as the second SHR-AAAS representative on the steering committee of the African Transitional Justice Research Network and was also the statistical consultant on a multi-national survey of the Project on Science and Intellectual Property
in the Public Interest. Finally, her work as the Metagora Training Materials Committee Chair, and as the Chair of the Rapid Response Committee of the Volunteerism Special Interest Group of the American Statistical Association, continued under the sponsorship of the AAAS during her tenure here.
Victoria Baxter
Victoria Baxter (2000-2006) joined the United Nations Organization in July of 2006 after five years as a SHR staff member. While
at AAAS as a Senior Program Associate, she directed the SHR Program's casework activities on behalf of persecuted scientists, engineers, and health professionals
through the AAAS Human Rights Action Network (AAASHRAN). Victoria was also the primary staff member on several SHR
transitional justice projects. Victoria was particularly interested in the issue of memorialization or how societies choose to remember
and interpret past violence, and served as the first SHR-AAAS representative on the steering committee of the
African Transitional Justice Research Network.
Amanda Brewster
Amanda Brewster (2003-2005) was a Program Associate for the Project on Science and Intellectual Property in
the Public Interest. She is interested in the application of scientific knowledge to address societal needs, particularly those related to
public health and the environment. Before joining AAAS, she worked on science policy issues for the National Council for Science and the
Environment. She has conducted research on pollination biology, and studied the ecology of Lyme disease transmission for her undergraduate thesis.
Amanda left AAAS to pursue her higher education at the London School of Economics.
Audrey R. Chapman
Audrey R. Chapman, Ph.D., (1991-2006) served as the Director of the Science
and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) for fifteen years. Until October 2002, she also directed the
AAAS Program of Dialogue on Science,
Ethics and Religion. Dr. Chapman directed or co-directed a series of AAAS
projects dealing with health and human rights issues, developing strategies
for monitoring economic and social rights, evaluating the effectiveness and
impact of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and exploring
the ethical and policy implications of genetic research and applications. She
left AAAS in June of 2006 to become the first holder of the Healey Memorial
Chair in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Connecticut
Health Center.
Shannon Dougherty
Shannon Dougherty (2007) was a Darfur Conflict Analyst for the Geospatial Technologies
and Human Rights Project. Her main interests include using geospatial technologies
as tools for community development, environmental conservation, and human rights issues.
She was the primary support staff member working on a Darfur-focused mapping project
that aimed to collect, analyze, and utilize satellite imagery to identify and highlight
the extent of destruction occurring in Darfur. She has a BA from Geneseo State University
in Geography and a dual MA in International Affairs/Natural Resources and Sustainable
Development from both American University and the University for Peace in Costa Rica.
Stephen A. Hansen
Stephen Hansen (1995-2007) was Project Director with the Science & Human Rights
Program. His work focused on projects relating to the effects of intellectual
property rights on science, and traditional knowledge and human rights. He served
as the Project Manager for the AAAS project Science
& Intellectual Property in the Public Interest (SIPPI). He is co-author
of the handbook Traditional Knowledge
and Intellectual Property and designed the Traditional
Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database (T.E.K.*P.A.D), an online digital
archive of traditional practices from local communities throughout the world
that are already in the public domain. Stephen’s other main area of work was
in economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), with a special concentration
in cultural rights where he worked with the United Nations Committee on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights and UNESCO. He is the author of a chapter on cultural
rights in the program’s publication Core
Obligations: Building a Framework for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Other ESCR work has been in violations monitoring and documentation, which included
the publication of the Thesaurus of
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. He has directed projects with the
National Commission for Human Rights in Honduras, and the Centro de Estudios
Legales y Sociales (Center for Legal and Social Research, CELS) in Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Stephen holds a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from Oberlin College
and an M.A. in Anthropology from The George Washington University in Washington,
DC.
Michael Kisielewski
Michael Kisielewski (2004-2007) was Program Associate for the AAAS project
on Science and Intellectual Property in the
Public Interest (SIPPI). His areas of interest included traditional knowledge
and intellectual property in the life sciences, intellectual property patenting
issues at the international level, and general national and international science
policy. Prior to joining AAAS, Michael served the Center for Science in the
Public Interest’s (CSPI) Food and Agriculture program as a research associate
and, before joining CSPI, he worked as a research associate for the National
Academy of Sciences’ Board and Agriculture and Natural Resources. In that capacity,
Michael provided background research and prepared text for several studies on
national and international agricultural biotechnology, where he worked with
numerous science advisory committees—many of which included experts whose innovations
were in the process of being patented. Michael received a Master of Arts degree
in International Security Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from George Washington University.
He has published and presented several professional conference papers on national
and international science policy.
Sean O’Connor
Sean O’Connor (2007) was a Burma Conflict Analyst for the Geospatial Technologies
and Human Rights Project. He graduated from the University of California, Santa
Barbara with an honors degree in physical geography in 2005. Since moving to
Washington, D.C. after college, Sean has worked as a researcher for National
Geographic Magazine and with geospatial technologies and development in Africa
with the international non-profit, Bridges.org. He has plans to attend the Communication,
Culture and Technology Master of Arts program at Georgetown University in the
Fall of 2007.
Sarah Olmstead
Sarah Olmstead (2004-2006) was Project Coordinator and later a consultant with
the Science and Human Rights Program. She left AAAS to become a graduate fellow
at the Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS) located in Santa Monica, California.
A slight departure from her masters work in physics, Sarah will be studying
for a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis. Sarah is interested in the intersection between
science and society and how science can be employed in the public interest.
She has worked with the Black Sash and the Parliamentary Monitoring Group in
South Africa, attending parliamentary meetings and disseminating minutes of
those meetings in an effort to encourage public understanding and oversight
of governmental processes. She received a B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd College
and an M.S. in physics from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where
her thesis was on in vivo autocorrelation spectroscopy of cotransfected
proteins.
Susan Wolfinbarger
Susan Wolfinbarger was an Analyst for the Geospatial Technologies
and Human Rights project, and a Ph.D. student in the Geography Department at
Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. At Ohio State, she worked as a graduate
research assistant for the NASA-funded FLAMES (Fire-Land-Atmosphere Modeling
and Evaluation for Southeast Asia) project.
Her primary interests were in the fields of: human rights, land use and the
environment, migration, geographic information systems, remote sensing, and
Latin America. Past research topics involved ecotourism and environmental concerns
in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador and ceramic production in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Susan has an M.A. from the Department of Geography at The George Washington
University in Washington, D.C.
Maggie Dodson
Maggie Dodson (Spring/Summer 2007) was an intern in the Geospatial Technologies
and Human Rights project working to create historical GIS layers for human rights
issues in Darfur, Sudan. Maggie was an undergraduate student at Elizabethtown
College in Pennsylvania studying Sociology and Anthropology with a concentration
in Criminal Justice. She was also obtaining a minor in Biology. She was interested
in applying geospatial technologies to historical anthropological studies.
John Sulik
John Sulik (Spring/Summer 2007) was a Remote Sensing Intern/Analyst for the Geospatial Technologies and
Human Rights Project. He was working towards a Master of Science in Geographic
Information Systems from The Florida State University, where he earned a B.S. in Political
Science. His primary interest was in applying geospatial technology to social issues. Examples
of this include digital change detection of village destruction in Darfur and integrating GIS
with forced migration models.
(page updated 11/07/2007)
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