Population and Family Health Chair Terry McGovern Named to Council on Foreign Relations

Terry McGovern, JD, Columbia Mailman School professor and chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health, was invited to be a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. Founded in 1921, the Council is a resource on foreign policy choices for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and civic and religious leaders. Membership is composed of many of the most prominent leaders in international affairs.
 
McGovern is founder and director of the Program on Global Health Justice and Governance at Columbia Mailman School. Her research focuses on health and human rights, sexual and reproductive rights and health, gender justice, and environmental justice, with publications appearing in many leading global health journals including Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Health and Human Rights, and the Journal of Adolescent Health. She recently co-edited Women and Girls Rising: Rights, Progress and Resistance: A Global Anthology.
 
Earlier, she founded the HIV Law Project where she served as its executive director until 1999. Ms. McGovern successfully litigated numerous cases against the federal, state and local governments including S.P. v. Sullivan which forced the Social Security Administration to expand HIV-related disability criteria so that women and other excluded individuals can qualify for Medicaid and social security, and T.N. v. FDA, which eliminated a 1977 FDA guideline restricting the participation of women of childbearing potential in early phases of clinical trials. As a member of the National Task Force on the Development of HIV/AIDS Drugs, she authored the 2001 federal regulation authorizing the FDA to halt any clinical trial for a life threatening disease that excludes women. 
 
From 2006 until 2012, she was Senior Program Officer in the Gender, Rights and Equality Unit of the Ford Foundation. She has served on the Standing Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing and the UCL-Lancet Commission on Migration and Health, and currently serves as a member of the UNFPA Global Advisory Council and the UNAIDS Human Rights Reference Group.