Mobilizing for More: Fighting for Equitable HIV/AIDs Healthcare
This immersive panel explains the importance, complexity, and procedures of mobilization and effective advocacy for the achievement of equitable and accessible healthcare. Hear directly from stakeholders involved with HIV/AIDs advocacy, such as doctors, educators, and policymakers about their experiences overcoming the obstacles that hinder treatment both globally and domestically.
Professor Brook Baker
Brook K. Baker, a professor at Northeastern U. School of Law, teaches disability discrimination law, negotiations and is developing a new course focused on human rights, intellectual property, and access to medicines. He has taught and consulted in South African law schools and law school clinics since 1997. Professor Baker is an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. Professor Baker is also a senior policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and is actively engaged in campaigns for universal access to treatment, prevention, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially expanded and improved medical treatment. He has written and consulted extensively on intellectual property rights, trade, investor-state dispute settlement, access to medicines, and medicines regulatory policy, including with the African Union, NEPAD, South Africa, Uganda, ASEAN, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, CARICOM, UK DfID, the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Goals Project, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Open Society Institute, UNAIDS, UNDP, Unitaid, the Medicines Patent Pool, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and others. He serves as a key advisor to NGO delegation to Unitaid, which acts to improve market dynamics and early market entry of medicines and diagnostics needed to address HIV/AIDS, TB, Hepatitis C and malaria. Professor Baker also works on policy issues concerning the Global Fund and the US PEPFAR Program, and how those priority disease initiatives might contribute more broadly to improving health care delivery in developing countries. Finally, he analyzes resource needs for global health, innovative financing mechanisms and IMF macroeconomic policies that restrict increased government and donor spending on health and education in developing countries.
Mr. Kevin Cranston
Kevin Cranston is Assistant Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) and Director of the MDPH Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences. Kevin previously served as HIV/AIDS Program Director at the Massachusetts Department of Education. Prior to government work, Kevin was an adolescent HIV prevention specialist at The Children's Hospital, Boston. He is past Chair of the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) and served as a technical advisor to national, state, and provincial AIDS control programs in Nigeria, Brazil, and South Africa. Kevin earned his Master of Divinity degree at Harvard University. Kevin is a member of the Massachusetts Special Legislative Commission on LGBT Aging, the Executive Committee of the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research (HU CFAR), and is a past member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA).
Dr. Sean Cahill
Sean Cahill, PhD is Director of Health Policy Research at the Fenway Institute, Affiliate Associate Clinical Professor of Health Sciences at Northeastern University, and Adjunct Associate Professor of the Practice in Health Law, Policy and Management at Boston University School of Public Health. Cahill serves on the Massachusetts Special Legislative Commission on LGBT Aging, and is Associate Editor at LGBT Health.
Dr. Shan Mohammed
Shan Mohammed is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Northeastern University and directed the Master of Public Health Program in Urban Health from 2007-2017. He has taught courses on Community and Public Health; Health Policy; Health Management; Health and Human Rights, and Principles and History of Urban Health.
Prior to coming to Northeastern University he was a faculty member at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine where he directed the Global Health track in the MPH Program and taught an interprofessional course in Uganda on Health, Human Rights and HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Mohammed is a board-certified family medicine physician and fellow of the American Association of Family Physicians. He obtained his MD degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH and his MPH degree from Boston University where he also received a Certificate in Health Care Delivery in Developing Countries. Before beginning his graduate studies he served as a US Peace Corps Volunteer with the Thai Ministry of Public Health implementing and evaluating health education and health promotion campaigns targeting HIV/AIDS and Iodine Deficiency Disorders in Northern Thailand along the Laotian border.
Dr. Alysse Wurcel
Alysse Wurcel is an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Tufts Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. A graduate of University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, she completed her Infectious Disease fellowship at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and Tufts Medical Center, and received a Masters in Clinical Research from the Sacker School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University. She currently provides HIV and hepatitis C care at Tufts Medical Center as well as four local county jails.
Dr. Wurcel’ s research interests include prevention and treatment of infection diseases in people who use drugs. In addition to being the site supervisor of industry studies, she has received funding from the Center for AIDS Research and Tufts University to work on understanding barriers and facilitators to delivery of medical care to people in jail and people who use drugs. Recently, she was awarded a KL2 grant from the Tufts Center for Translational Studies Institute to work with key stakeholders in the criminal justice and public health systems to evaluate and improve current hepatitis C testing and treatment protocols in jails.