Aysha Akhtar, M.D., M.P.H., is the President and CEO of the Center for Contemporary Sciences, which is pioneering the transition to replace the use of animals in experimentation with superior human-based testing methods. She is a double-board certified neurologist and preventive medicine specialist, with a background in public health, and is a U.S veteran. Previously she served as Deputy Director of the U.S. Army Traumatic Brain Injury Program developing the Army’s brain injury prevention and treatment strategies for soldiers. As a Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Dr. Akhtar frequently deployed to assist with national public health emergencies.
For a decade, Aysha was a Medical Officer at the Food and Drug Administration, most recently in the Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats, implementing studies on vaccine effectiveness and safety and using her Top-Secret Security Clearance to develop national preparedness strategies for public health threats.
Aysha is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She is the author of the two books, Our Symphony With Animals. On Health, Empathy and Our Shared Destinies and Animals and Public Health, which argues for the need for health institutions to include animals as part of the “public” in public health. Aysha is a TEDx speaker.
Aysha is vegan and has a naturalistic worldview.
Find Aysha’s Sentientist Conversation with me here on YouTube and Podcast.
@DrAyshaAkhtar
ayshaakhtar.com
Aysha’s TEDx talk about how treating animals better is not only good for non-human animals, but also good for us human animals.
Aysha’s author profile at HuffPost