2025 Honorees

Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH

Dr. Leaning is Senior Research Fellow at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, retired, at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.

She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Harvard Lakshmi Mittal Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University and of the Steering Committee of the Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, based in Geneva.

In her years as HSPH Professor of the Practice (1999-2018), she founded a program in humanitarian studies at the FXB Center that became a university-wide program (the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative) which she co-directed from 2005-2010.  In prior years, Dr. Leaning held progressively responsible roles in medical management and worked clinically in emergency medicine from 1978 (and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston from 1986-2005).

She has served on the boards of directors of many non-profits, including Physicians for Social Responsibility (1979-1992); International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1986-1993); and Physicians for Human Rights (1988-2010). She was editor of the PSR Quarterly  (1989-1994) and then its successor Medicine and Global Survival (1994-2000). She is currently a member of the Advisory Committee of Physicians for Human Rights, USA.

Her current research interests focus on issues of public health and international law and human rights in response to war and disaster. She has field experience in assessment of these issues in a range of crisis situations (including Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Kosovo, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, Pakistan, former Soviet Union and Russia, Somalia, the Chad-Darfur border, and the African Great Lakes area) and is the author of many academic articles and book chapters.

She earned her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard/Radcliffe College, her MS from Harvard School of Public Health, and her M.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.  She trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and during her years of clinical practice of emergency medicine was board certified in both specialties.

She is lead editor of three books: The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations, Sage India 2022; Humanitarian Crises: The Medical and Public Health Response, Harvard University Press 1999; and The Counterfeit Ark: Crisis Relocation for Nuclear War, Ballinger Press 1994.