Susannah Sirkin

Susannah Sirkin is deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, or PHR, a national organization that mobilizes health professionals to advance the health and dignity of all people through action that promotes respect for and protection and fulfillment of human rights. She has held this position since 1987 when she joined the organization's staff shortly after its founding. Previously, she was director of membership programs for Amnesty International USA.

Sirkin has organized health and human rights investigations to dozens of countries, including recent documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Darfur and Sudan, PHR's exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals, investigations into consequences of human rights abuses, and violations of international humanitarian law in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey, Zimbabwe, and the United States among others. She has worked on studies of sexual violence in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Thailand, and Chad. She has authored and edited numerous reports and articles on the medical consequences of human rights violations, physical evidence of human rights abuses, and physician complicity in violations. Ms. Sirkin co-developed and directed the first postgraduate course in medicine and human rights initiated at Harvard Medical School in 1992, and lectures regularly on health and human rights in medical schools and schools of public health. Sirkin serves as PHR's representative on the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights Steering Committee. Sirkin also served from 1992 to2001 for PHR as a member of the Coordination Committee of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. PHR is one of the six original non-governmental organizations that launched the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1992.

Sirkin is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and received a master of education at Boston University.