Abigail English

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Abigail English is the director of the Center for Adolescent Health & the Law, a nonprofit organization in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her research and policy interests focus on adolescents’ access to comprehensive health care, health insurance and public financing of care for adolescents and young adults, consent and confidentiality protections, and sexual and reproductive health care. Her work emphasizes the needs of vulnerable young people. At Radcliffe, English will address the problem of sexual exploitation and trafficking of adolescents, with its devastating physical and emotional effects on their development, health, and well-being. In her research, she will draw on laws, treaties, and human rights documents—as well as key sources in adolescent health and development, philosophy, literature, poetry, and art—and use informant interviews and focus-group meetings with diverse stakeholders. English will explore ways that lawyers and health-care professionals can collaborate to develop policy recommendations and an action agenda to reduce the sexual exploitation and trafficking of adolescents and to protect the health of those who have been victimized. English received her undergraduate degree in philosophy and government from Radcliffe College and her law degree from UC Berkeley School of Law. She was a Gallagher Lecturer for the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine in 1987, and she received the Child Advocacy Award from the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division in 1997 and the Outstanding Achievement Award in Adolescent Medicine from the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine in 2000.