2018 Hardy Lecture

Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 8:00 a.m. ET
Sherman Auditorium, East Campus, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
330 Brookline Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02215

Co-sponsored by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. This lecture provides one CME Credit for Physicians.

Dayna Bowen Matthew, JD is the William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law, and the F. Palmer Weber Research Professor of Civil Liberties and Human Rights at the University of Virginia School of Law. She is a published expert in law and policy related to health care, public health, race, and equal protection. Prior to joining the Virginia faculty, Professor Matthew taught at the University of Colorado for fourteen years. She served from 2004 – 2011 as the University of Colorado Law School’s Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, and then as the Colorado Law School’s Vice Dean. In addition to directing the school’s Health Law and Policy program, Matthew taught Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, and a variety of Health and Public Health law courses.

Dayna Bowen Matthew grew up in the South Bronx. She graduated with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981. After working as a commercial real estate banker on Wall Street, Professor Matthew returned to school and graduated with her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987. She was extremely active during her time as a student at UVA Law. She was the first African American to serve as an editor of the Virginia Law Review; she won the Law School's William Minor Lile Moot Court Competition; and she taught as a Hardy Dillard Writing Fellow. After graduation, Matthew clerked for Justice John Charles Thomas, the first African American justice to sit on the Virginia Supreme Court. Matthew practiced law as a civil litigator first at MGuire Woods in Virginia, and later at the law firm of Greenebaum, Doll and McDonald in Kentucky.

In 2015, Matthew served as the Senior Legal Adviser to the Director of the Office of Civil Rights, at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. There, she worked to expedite civil rights cases filed by historically vulnerable communities ravaged by pollution. In 2016, Matthew became a member of the health policy team for U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. During 2015-2016, Professor Matthew was named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow, in residence in Washington, D.C.  Professor Matthew is currently a non-resident senior fellow for the Brookings Institution, and a visiting health policy fellow at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

Professor Matthew’s primary research interests are in health equity and integrated health care delivery, with an emphasis on developing alternative payment models to address social determinants. She is a principle or co-investigator on studies examining the impact that providing legal services to underrepresented patients may have on their health outcomes.  Professor Matthew has co-founded two medical- legal partnerships (MLPs) to provide attorneys for low income patients.  She co-founded the Colorado Health Equity Project (CHEP) to form MLPs throughout Colorado.  CHEP works in collaboration with integrated, primary care providers serving low-income communities.  Upon her arrival in Virginia, Matthew co-founded Common Cause, another medical-legal partnership through which attorneys and law students provide direct legal representation to patients and to communities whose health is adversely affected by legal problems related to the social determinants of health. Both MLPs also train providers and develop policy strategies to improve public health of low-income populations.She is the author of Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care, as well as numerous articles on healthcare, public health, and antitrust law topics that have appeared in the Virginia Law Review, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives, and the American Journal of Law and Medicine, and numerous other journals.