Amir Attaran
| Amir Attaran | |
|---|---|
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| Born | San Diego, California |
| Nationality | Canada, USA, Iran |
| Occupation | Professor, University of Ottawa |
| Known for | Human rights and public health work |
Amir Attaran (Persian: امیر عطاران) is a Canadian-American-Iranian law and medicine professor. Currently, Attaran is a Full Professor in both the Faculty of Law and the School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa.
Attaran was born in California to immigrants from Iran. He attended public schools in Sacramento area.
Attaran earned a B.A. in neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley, after which he worked in the x-ray crystallography laboratory of Professor Robert Stroud at the University of California at San Francisco on a project to determine the 3-D structure of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor.
Attaran received a predoctoral fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for graduate studies in the biomedical sciences, leading to degrees from Caltech (M.S., 1992) and Oxford University (D.Phil., 1996). At Oxford, he matriculated to Wadham College and studied under Professor David Shotton of the Department of Zoology and Professor Alain Townsend of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. His doctoral thesis examined how killer T-cells modify themselves structurally in response to viral infections as a precursor to granulocyte- and apoptosis-mediated cytotoxicity, and is entitled "CTL cytotoxicity and the cytoskeleton: a microscopial study".
While at Oxford pursuing his science doctorate, Attaran simultaneously enrolled in law school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He graduated with an LL.B., was called to the bar in 1999, and has been a barrister and solicitor of the Law Society of Upper Canada since 2005.
From 2000 to 2003, Attaran held a junior academic position at Harvard University in the Kennedy School of Government, where his research focus was on public health law and policy. At Harvard he co-directed the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health in the Center for International Development under Jeffrey Sachs, and researched the influence of patent law on the ability of patients to access life-saving medicines and the human right to health at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy under Michael Ignatieff. From 2003 to 2005, Attaran taught at Yale University in the School of Public Health, and was a fellow at Chatham House (formerly the Royal Institute of International Affairs) in London, where he researched global development, patent law, and access to essential medicines for neglected diseases such as malaria.
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