The University of Pittsburgh has awarded Assistant Professor Matiangai Sirleaf the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award for 2019.
The Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award annually recognizes outstanding scholarly accomplishments of members of the University of Pittsburgh’s faculty. Awardees include faculty members who, by virtue of the exceptional quality of their early contributions, have demonstrated great potential as scholars and have achieved some international standing.
Sirleaf is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University Pittsburgh Law School. She previously served as an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a lecturer for the International Human Rights Exchange Programme run by Bard College and University of the Witwatersrand, teaching courses in international law, criminal law, human rights and transitional justice. Her work focuses on remedying the accountability and responsibility gaps that exist in international law. Her current research agenda analyzes the disproportionate distribution of highly-infectious diseases and the role of law in facilitating this result.
From 2010 to 2012, Sirleaf worked in private practice with Cohen, Milstein, Sellers & Toll in Washington, D.C., where she represented plaintiffs in numerous international human rights cases litigated in federal courts. Prior to that, she served as a law clerk to Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, as a fellow with the International Center for Transitional Justice, and as a summer associate with Debevoise & Plimpton in New York City, and as a law clerk with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia. She received her JD from Yale Law School in 2008 and her MA from the University of Ghana (Legon) in International Affairs in 2005. In 2014, she received the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award from New York University.
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