Purvaja Kavattur
Associate, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University
Purvaja Kavattur is a staff associate at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. She currently is working on a review of menstrual health policies in Senegal, Kenya, India, and the United States.
Her past work has been in evaluating Title X funded programs in Boston, sexuality education policies in Massachusetts, and maternal and child health interventions in Ethiopia and Tanzania. She is interested in exploring anti-colonial approaches to global health, as well as the intersections between population control, gender and sexuality. Her research has looked at the abortion experiences of transmasculine youth in the United States, as well as the influence that scientific literature plays in U.S. abortion jurisprudence.
She has a MSc in Global Health and Population from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a BSc (Hons) in Social Policy and Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Outside of academia, she works as a visual artist and has 5 years of grassroots feminist organizing experience spanning the UK and US.
Working Group Affiliation