User:Kbkphx/Jennifer Leaning

Jennifer Leaning (born 1945) is the Director of the Francois Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, Professor of the Practice of International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on international human rights and humanitarian law, humanitarian crises and international medical emergencies.

Early Life and Education
Leaning was born in San Francisco, California. Her father, W. John Leaning, was a British diplomat stationed in California during World War II. Her parents divorced when she was young, and Leaning was raised by her mother in New Paltz, New York. Leaning graduated from Radcliffe College, magna cum laude, in 1968, and won the Captain Fay Prize, which was the highest honor Radcliffe bestowed on a graduating senior. While at Radcliffe, she took a year off to teach and work in Tanzania. She moved from Radcliffe to the Harvard School of Public Health, where she completed the S.M.H. in 1970. She received her medical degree from the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago in 1975.

Career
Leaning is a founding board member of Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that "investigates and exposes violations of human rights worldwide using medical and scientific means, and uses this to stop them." Leaning practiced emergency medicine at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts and at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston until she joined the Harvard faculty full-time in 1999. She continued, however, to work shifts in the emergency department at Brigham and Women's until the assumed the directorship of the FXB Center.