Rasha Khoury
Dr. Rasha Khoury is a Palestinian physician and public health activist born and raised in East Jerusalem. She moved to the US for medical training, graduated from Yale School of Medicine in 2008 and completed her residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California San Francisco. She then pursued a fellowship in Family Planning and Global Women's Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital and received her Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2013. In 2014, fulfilling a life long dream, she joined MSF and has since completed 6 surgical missions in Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Cote D'Ivoire, Iraq and for more than a year in Afghanistan. Dr. Khoury currently works clinically in high-risk obstetrics in the Bronx, NY with a research focus on reducing severe maternal morbidity and mortality. She is a member of the MSF where she uplifts and amplifies the voices of patients and global staff in the MSF movement.
Diala Shamas
Diala Shamas is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she works on challenging government and law enforcement abuses perpetrated under the guise of national security, both in the U.S. and abroad. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Yale, where she was an editor for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal. Diala has represented individuals who were approached for questioning by local and federal law enforcement, targeted for surveillance, placed on federal watch-lists or who have had immigration benefits withheld on national security grounds. She advises social justice movements and advocates as they face suppression efforts at the hands of the state and private actors. Diala has also worked on a range of international human rights issues. This includes human rights and humanitarian law violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territory, where she is from. She recently successfully defended the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights in a multi-year litigation brought by the Jewish National Fund. The JNF unsuccessfully sought to silence the organization and punish them for their support of the Palestinian-led boycott movement by charging them with support for terrorism.