Executive Director

Susannah Baruch, JD is the Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. She manages the Center’s sponsored research portfolio, event programming, fellowships, student engagement, development, and a range of other projects and collaborations.

Susannah has deep and broad experience in health law policy and has held key leadership roles in nonprofits, academia, and government. Her research focuses on reproductive health law policy and issues surrounding genetics and genomics. A strategic thought leader and experienced Executive Director, Susannah is trained in design thinking and innovative approaches to complex legal and policy puzzles. Susannah’s work has been published in venues such as STAT News, Slate, Contraception, The American Journal of Human Genetics, and Fertility and Sterility.

Previously, Susannah led the National Health Law Program’s Reproductive and Sexual Health team, Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, and the Reproductive Health Technologies Project. She has managed working groups and multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder collaborations related to Medicaid, sex selective technologies, compensated gestational surrogacy, crisis pregnancy centers, and reproductive genetic testing. She was a founder of the Coalition for Genetic Fairness, and for seven years served as Law and Policy Director at Johns Hopkins University’s Genetics and Public Policy Center, convening legal experts, scientists, clinicians, ethicists, and public opinion pollsters to develop policy options — grounded in science, law, medicine, and ethics — for emerging reproductive technologies.

Susannah has worked extensively with federal and state policymakers and regulators and was involved in enactment of both the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and the first federal contraceptive coverage requirement through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. In her early career, she was a Skadden Fellow and Director of Health Law Policy at the Women’s Legal Defense Fund (now the National Partnership for Women & Families) and Legislative Counsel for United States Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey (D-NY). Susannah is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and has an undergraduate degree in History from Yale University.