Susannah Sirkin

Susannah Sirkin is the former director of policy and a senior advisor at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), where she worked from 1987 to 2022, helping to launch the organization and lead its many investigations and advocacy initiatives spanning almost four decades. In her most recent capacity, she oversaw PHR’s policy engagement, including with the United Nations, domestic and international justice systems, and human rights coalitions.

Her work at PHR over the years included overseeing the documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Darfur, Sudan; coordinating exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals; and documentation of the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Sirkin played a lead role in PHR’s extensive documentation of attacks on health care facilities and personnel in conflict zones, including Syria and Yemen. She initiated PHR’s program to train doctors, lawyers, law enforcement officers, and judges to respond to sexual violence in conflict zones, initially working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, and Kenya. Sirkin 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.

Today, Ms. Sirkin serves as a member of the Steering Committee for the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition. She represented PHR from 1992 to 2001 as a member of the Coordination Committee of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. From 2017 to 2019, Sirkin was a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is a recipient of Tufts University’s Jean Meyer Global Citizenship Award.

Sirkin holds a BA in Modern European studies from Mount Holyoke College and an MEd from Boston University

I have known Susannah for decades, since late 1970’s when we worked together to secure the freedom of emigration of Soviet Jewish democratic “refusniks, traveling to Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere. She has participated in numerous Institute events, including EPIIC symposia, and professional workshops and simulations for decades since 1988. I had the honor of awarding Susannah Sirkin, my good friend, our Institute’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2012.