UAEM North America Announces new Executive Director: Justin Mendoza

April 4, 2023 - Washington, DC: Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, North America (UAEM) announced today that it had appointed Justin Mendoza, MPH, the new executive director for the organization. 

Before joining UAEM  North America as Executive Director, Justin led Partners In Health United States' efforts on domestic policy and advocacy strategy, where he worked on legislative policy changes like the American Rescue Plan Act and advocated for a rational COVID-19 response. Previously, Justin worked on health care priorities with Families USA and Public Citizen in Washington D.C., focused  on lowering drug prices, taking on pharmaceutical patent overreach, expanding health care coverage, and lowering underlying health care costs. 

Justin holds an MPH in Health Policy from Yale University and a B.S. in biomedical sciences and neuroscience from Central Michigan University. As a student, he led UAEM chapters at both universities and served on the UAEM North America Coordinating Committee and Board of Directors.

“I first joined this great network in 2010 as a student, and now I am excited to take on this next step and lead us into new spaces and opportunities to advance the access to medicines movement,” said Justin Mendoza, Executive Director, UAEM North America. “I’m excited to build upon the work we’ve done so far, and see us grow our student network to influence university policy across North America.”

UAEM’s recent work includes efforts to expand affordable access policies that tie the upstream research done at universities to the final accessibility and pricing of the final research project, and efforts to convince the U.S. Food and Drug Agency to enforce existing laws requiring clinical trial results to be published. Recently, the organization filed a Citizen’s petition with the U.S. FDA on this topic, more details are available here. 

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