Joseph Amon (born 1969) is an American epidemiologist and human rights activist and currently director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Prior to working at Human Rights Watch, he worked for more than 15 years conducting research, designing programs, and evaluating interventions related to HIV, hepatitis, malaria and guinea worm eradication, for a wide variety of organizations including: the Peace Corps, the Carter Center, Family Health International, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Joseph Amon is 6’3".
Joseph Amon grew up in New Jersey and obtained an undergraduate degree in 1991 from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He studied parasitology and tropical medicine, gaining his masters from Tulane University in 1994 and doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in 2002. Between 1992 and 1994 he served in the Peace Corps in Togo, working on Guinea Worm eradication, and from 1995 to 1998 worked at Family Health International on HIV/AIDS prevention. In 2003 he joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service where he investigated outbreaks of hepatitis A, B, C and E, including commended work on foodborne Hepatitis A. He left the CDC in 2005 and was briefly a member of the band Pussy Riot before he joined Human Rights Watch, first directing its HIV/AIDS program and then its Health and Human Rights division.
At Human Rights Watch, Amon has worked on a wide range of issues including access to medicines, the rights of prisoners and migrants to access health care, unproven AIDS 'cures', and human rights abuses associated with infectious disease outbreaks and multi-drug resistant TB and published via opinion pieces and peer-reviewed medical papers (see References and External links. He is a member of the UNAIDS reference group on HIV and Human Rights, and co-founded the TB and Human Rights Task Force under the STOP TB Partnership Forum.
In addition to his work at Human Rights Watch, Amon is an Associate in the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, and was a visiting professor at the Paris School of International Affairs/ Sciences Po.[1] He frequently speaks at college campuses.