About > Secretariat

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The Secretariat is JLICA's administrative and operational branch, responsible for ensuring that program objectives and work product deadlines are met. The Secretariat is also the Initiative's communications hub, coordinating the exchange of information between JLICA leadership, Learning Groups, partner institutions and the general public.

Program duties are split between two offices, one in Boston, Massachusetts at Harvard University's FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and the other at FXB International headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

The JLICA Secretariat includes two Co-Directors who oversee all program management and administrative functions and a project manager, who performs day-to-day administrative and communications tasks.

Secretariat Staff Biographies

Alayne Adams, Co-Director

Based in Geneva, Dr. Adams is the Co-Director of the JLICA Secretariat. Prior to joining JLICA, she was a faculty member at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. She received her doctorate in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and pursued post-doctoral studies as a MacArthur Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Population and Development Studies. Her research interests concern the social and behavioral determinants of health including women's social networks, community social capital, poverty, and gender. Other areas of expertise include participatory research, the development of innovative approaches to qualitative data collection and analysis, and problem-based learning. In addition to her academic pursuits, Dr. Adams has lived and worked extensively in Africa (Mali and Botswana), has acted as a research consultant for UNICEF, UNDP and the Aga Khan Foundation. She has sustained 15 year research collaboration with BRAC, a large NGO in Bangladesh involved in women's development, poverty alleviation and health, and is currently an international faculty member at BRAC University's James P. Grant School of Public Health.

Prior to her appointment at Columbia, Dr. Adams was a MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. As a Commonwealth Scholar, she received her doctoral training at the London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine. Undergraduate studies in political science were pursued at McGill University

Alec Irwin, Co-Director

Alec Irwin is an ethicist and public health policy analyst whose primary areas of work include: (1) HIV/AIDS policy; (2) the underlying social and political determinants of health; and (3) human-rights based approaches to health. After completing a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Irwin taught for four years as an Assistant Professor at Amherst College. In 2002, Irwin left Amherst to work full time under Dr. Jim Kim at the Boston-based health charity Partners In Health and subsequently at the World Health Organization, Geneva. In 2003, as a member of the Transition Team for incoming WHO Director-General LEE Jong-wook, Irwin contributed to the preparation of the new Director-General's global health leadership agenda. Subsequently, Irwin accepted an offer to remain at WHO in the Department of Equity, Poverty and Social Determinants of Health (EIP/EQH), where he served as a member of the technical secretariat of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health. While at WHO, Irwin was a principal writer on two World Health Reports: WHR 2003: Shaping the future, and WHR 2004: HIV/AIDS: Changing history. He was also a member of the Task Force which drafted WHO's eleventh General Programme of Work (GPW), the organization's principal long-range planning document, covering the period 2007-2015. Irwin contributed in particular to drafting the sections of the GPW dealing with health equity, the social determinants of health and an ethical framework for global public health. Irwin was a co-editor of and contributor to the book Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (2000). Through a series of regional case studies and thematic chapters, the book explored the impact of recent patterns of global economic and political change on the health of poor people. Irwin's 2003 book Global AIDS: Myths and Facts, written with Joyce Millen and Dorothy Fallows, continues to enjoy frequent course adoptions in academic institutions and has been translated into Spanish and Japanese.

Kavitha Nallathambi, Project Manager

Kavitha Nallathambi is the Project Manager for the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS (JLICA). She provides key administrative and project support to the initiative and coordinates work among the four learning groups. Prior to joining FXB, Ms. Nallathambi worked at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia as an administrative and research assistant for visiting fellow Peter Bell, former president and CEO of CARE, and a co-chair of the JLICA. She received her Masters' degree in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. She wrote her thesis on creating incentives to fund research and development for neglected diseases related to poverty. She did her undergraduate studies at Emory University, where she obtained a Bachelor's in International Studies with a concentration in Journalism. She has interned for a number of media organizations including CNN Headline News and COXnet. Additionally, she served as a research assistant at the Stanhope Centre for communications policy research in London, where she worked on a fellowship program for journalists from East Africa. Ms. Nallathambi speaks Tamil and French. She is a volunteer editor for OneWorld UK country guides and her interests also include writing poetry and short stories.

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