Benjamin Mason Meier, JD, LLM, PhD

Dr. Meier’s interdisciplinary research—at the intersection of global health, international law and public policy—examines rights-based approaches to health. Working collaboratively across the Gillings School, Dr. Meier has written and presented extensively on the development, evolution and application of human rights in global health.

As a contributor to the development of global health policy, Dr. Meier serves additionally as a senior scholar at Georgetown Law School’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, as the past chair of the American Public Health Association’s Human Rights Forum, as the human rights chair of the Global Health Law Consortium, and as a consultant to international organizations, national governments and non-governmental organizations.

His recent global health governance volume, Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance in a Globalizing World (OUP 2018), examines the influence of human rights across the health efforts of the United Nations. Drawing from this comparative analysis of international organizations, Dr. Meier has published an academic textbook for the field of health and human rights, Foundations of Global Health & Human Rights (OUP 2020). To advance legal scholarship in the pandemic response, he has recently launched a quarterly column on global health law in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

In June 2017, he received the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, in November 2018, he received the Early Career Award for Excellence in Public Health Law from the American Public Health Association, in March 2019, he received the Teaching Innovation Award from the Department of Health Policy & Management, and in October 2021, he received the Mid-Career Award in International Health from the American Public Health Association.

Dr. Meier received his doctoral degree in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University, his JD and LLM degrees in international and comparative law from Cornell Law School, and his BA in biochemistry from Cornell University.