| Christina Baker is entering her third year at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, and holds a bachelor's degree in international law and diplomacy, with a minor in Spanish studies, from Brigham Young University. She has an interest in human rights, immigration, and refugee law. She recently participated in Cardozo's Human Rights and Genocide Clinic for which she collaborated with Human Rights Watch on a comparative study of the salient factors in the formation and implementation of truth commissions. Last summer she received a Human Rights Fellowship from Cardozo to intern with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in Vienna, Austria. There she interviewed Iranian religious minorities for U.S. refugee status and processed their claims. Before law school, she was a public education intern at the American Immigration Law Foundation in Washington, D.C. and is active in the immigrant community. She has also done extensive country-condition research for political asylum claims based on religion and gender for private attorney. She holds a position as Annotations Editor for the Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender, which will publish her note this fall entitled "French Headscarves and the U.S. Constitution: Parents, Children, and the Free Exercise of Religion." She also served as Vice President of the International Law Society and is active in Cardozo Students for Human Rights. Ms. Baker has spent many years living, working, and studying in Madrid, London, Jerusalem, Athens, and Nicosia, and speaks fluent Spanish and Greek.
Rebecca Bers is currently pursuing her J.D. at New York University school of Law (NYU). She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Puget Sound, majoring in Comparative Politics, with minors in Women’s Studies and English. She interned at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office during the summer of 2004 before beginning law school in New York. While in law school, Rebecca has worked with NGO’s through the student organization, NYU Law Students for Human Rights (LSHR). With the LSHR Advocacy Committee, Ms. Bers worked with the World Organization for Human Rights researching amicus briefs to be submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Guantanamo Bay cases. Ms. Bers works with Praxis this summer to contribute to social justice in Peru, having done research for Praxis through LSHR.
Sylvia Gentry studied Economics and Hispanic Studies at Vassar College. While at Vassar, Sylvia spent a semester abroad in Madrid, Spain and spent time in Cuba studying the effects of the US embargo on socio-economic development. After working for a year as a legal assistant in the Latin American Underwriting Securities group at Cravath, Swaine and Moore, LLP in New York, Sylvia moved to Washington, DC to work on Housing and Community Development initiatives at Fannie Mae. During her two year stint at Fannie Mae, Sylvia led a team that translated portions of a homebuyer counseling software from English into Spanish in an effort to facilitate communications between homebuyer counselors and the Hispanic communities they serve. While at Fannie Mae, Sylvia developed an economic model of how homeownership counseling agencies are funded in order to conduct a flow of funds analysis of these non profit organizations. Sylvia Gentry is currently at New York University School of Law and is expected to graduate in May 2008.
Jocelyn Getgen finished her second year of law school at Cornell and is beginning her work towards a masters in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in July. After graduating from Cornell University, Jocelyn worked as a health promotion assistant and HIV pre- and post-test counselor at Gannett Health Center in Ithaca, NY. Then, she lived and worked for three years in a small town in the southern Andes of Ecuador as a rural health volunteer in the Peace Corps. In law school, Jocelyn is the admissions editor for the International Law Journal and wrote a note recommended for publication looking critically at the Peruvian TRC's exclusion of enforced sterilizations of mainly Quechua women committed by the Fujimori regime under its population control program. She also spent a summer interning for the Domestic Violence Law Project and the Immigration Law Project of Safe Horizon in Brooklyn, NY. Jocelyn speaks Spanish and is learning Quechua and American Sign Language. She loves to salsa and has a weakness for vanilla lattes.
Megan Jack graduated from Western Michigan University with BBA in Management and an additional Spanish Major. She is currently pursuing a J.D. at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of law where she is Secretary for the Latin American Law Students Association and Fundraising Chair for the Public Interest Law Students Association. Megan's commitment to human rights began before high school, when she started volunteering on a regular basis as a translator for NGOs providing medical care for people in the developing nations of Central America. She continues to look for opportunities to dedicate her work to fighting for and preserving Human Rights.
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