Health Law Workshop: Dayna Matthew: On Charlottesville
Presentation
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About the Presenter
Dayna Bowen Matthew is William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law, F. Palmer Weber Research Professor of Civil Liberties and Human Rights, and Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is a leader in public health who focuses on racial disparities in health care, and the author of the book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care.
Matthew previously served on the University of Colorado law faculty as a professor, vice dean and associate dean of academic affairs. She was a member of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities on the Anschutz Medical Campus and held a joint appointment at the Colorado School of Public Health.
She has also taken on many public policy roles. Matthew worked with a law firm partner in 2013 to found the Colorado Health Equity Project, a medical-legal partnership incubator aimed at removing barriers to good health for low-income clients by providing legal representation, research and policy advocacy. In 2015 she served as the senior adviser to the director of the Office of Civil Rights for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she expedited cases on behalf of historically vulnerable communities besieged by pollution. She then became a member of the health policy team for U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, and worked on public health issues.
During 2015-16 she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow, in residence in Washington, D.C., and pivoted her work toward population-level clients. She forged relationships with influential policy groups such as the Brookings Institution, where she is currently a non-resident senior fellow, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Before academia, Matthew practiced as a civil litigator both in Kentucky, at the law firm of Greenebaum, Doll and McDonald, and in Virginia, at McGuireWoods, where her work primarily focused on the defense of medical care providers and corporate manufacturers in state courts, federal courts, and before administrative and licensing tribunals.
Matthew graduated with an AB in economics from Harvard-Radcliffe and, after a brief stint as a commercial real estate banker, obtained a JD from the University of Virginia. While studying at Virginia, Matthew served as an editor of the Virginia Law Review, won the Law School's William Minor Lile Moot Court Competition, and taught as a Hardy Dillard Writing Fellow. Following graduation, Matthew clerked for Justice John Charles Thomas, the first African-American justice to sit on the Virginia Supreme Court. She taught at Virginia as an assistant professor from 1991-94. In 2018, she received a PhD in health and behavioral sciences from the University of Colorado at Denver.