Jaykumar means child of victory. He specialises in the impossible. He seeks to creatively realize human rights for billions. He is an international human rights lawyer and social entrepreneur. Newsweek named Jaykumar as one of “America’s 50 Greatest Disruptors: Visionaries Who Are Changing the World.” He received the William Rogers Award, the Brown Alumni Association’s highest honour, given to one graduate per year. He was chosen for the world’s Worthy 100.
Jaykumar has freed a man from death row. As the fifteenth lawyer to take up the case, he helped free another man serving life, by hunting through the toughest prisons of New York for the real killer. He represented the student leaders of Tiananmen Square against the former Premier of China, and helped win longshot victories on behalf of victims of the Bosnian genocide, environmental activists from Nigeria, and non-violent protestors in New York. In public health, he has reduced the world’s most widespread form of malnutrition at scale, by taking salt “double fortified” with iron and iodine to tens of millions of people and billions of meals. And he and colleagues seek to create a world of medicine for all, via an open-source paradigm for pharma.
He is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His work has been profiled in The New Yorker, Fast Company, New York magazine, The New York Times, and The Times of India. Jaykumar has held academic positions at Harvard and McGill. He holds a JD and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia and completed a BA and one year of medical school at Brown.
