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LLE: The Most Important Question for an Engineer
Distinguished speaker: Jaykumar Menon, Harvard University
Abstract
The most important question for an engineer has nothing to do with engineering. It has, rather, to do with heart, astuteness, strategic savvy, multidisciplinarity, a sense of fairness, and the problems on which you choose to work. What can you do that will maximize your positive impact on the world, and how can you do it? This talk will touch on those questions, as well as the speaker’s work in human rights, and in Open Source Pharma. En route, it will provide real life examples hatched at the University of Toronto, such as the development of insulin, and the double-fortified salt project that has reached tens of millions of people.
Bio
Jaykumar Menon is an international human rights lawyer and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of human rights and global health. He is a founder of the Open Source Pharma Foundation, which aims to create a new paradigm for drug discovery, and generate affordable new cures in areas of great health need, and of The India Nutrition Initiative, which is developing “DFS”, a salt that is double-fortified with iron and iodine, to address malnutrition caused by iron deficiency, which afflicts over 2 billion people. DFS has been included in over 1 billion meals, and has reduced iron deficiency at scale.
As a litigator, he has represented the student leaders of Tiananmen Square, victims of the Bosnian genocide, the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa against Shell Oil, freed a man from death row, and exonerated another serving a life sentence, as the fifteenth lawyer to take up the case. He is a recipient of the Brown Alumni Association’s highest honor, given to one graduate per year, a finalist for Sweden’s Tallberg Global Leadership Prize, and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He just completed a two-year stint as a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute.
Jaykumar is a published creative writer. He holds a JD and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University and a completed a BA and one year of medical school at Brown.
View the complete 2020-21 LLE schedule
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