Making Impact: Fighting for Human Rights at UC Berkeley
Join the Human Rights Center for a discussion of how Berkeley students engage in impactful human rights investigations and fieldwork. Executive Director Betsy Popken, J.D., will speak with Bhavya Joshi, doctor of public health candidate, School of Public Health, and Sabreen Tuku ’24 (political science) about their experiences as human rights fellows and participants in the Center's reputed Investigations Lab.
Hosted by Human Rights Center
Speakers:
Bhavya Joshi is a global public health researcher, educator, and women human rights advocate from India. She is a research fellow with the Human Rights Center and a doctor of public health (Dr.P.H.) candidate at the School of Public Health, passionate about advancing health equity, human rights, and community-driven solutions. Her research focuses on the utilization and delivery of reproductive health in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. Grounded in a human rights and community-based participatory approach, Bhavya is committed to reaching the furthest behind first — ensuring that their voices are included in the academic discourse.
Sabreen Tuku is a program assistant with the Center for Justice & Accountability’s Administrative and Development teams. She previously served as a Human Rights Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, spending the summer in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she investigated digital threats in the country. Prior to that, Sabreen was a research fellow with the Institute for International Studies, focusing on public support in international negotiations. As a student researcher at the Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab, she contributed to an international investigation on the blinding of protesters in Iran during the Women, Life, Freedom movement. Sabreen holds a B.A. in political science with a concentration in international relations and a minor in human rights from UC Berkeley.
Betsy Popken is the executive director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law. Betsy spearheads HRC’s work on international peace negotiations, currently focused on digital hostilities in conflict. She also leads a team conducting a human rights impact assessment and model evaluation of large language models. Betsy is a senior advisor to HRC’s climate disasters initiative, co-authoring a California Climate Change Assessment report on climate migration and displacement in the state. Drawing from her real-world experience, Betsy is a lecturer at Berkeley Law on International Peace Negotiations and Technology & Human Rights.