Lena Ashooh

Biography

Lena is a fourth-year student at Harvard where she majored in Animal Studies and was a Junior Phi Beta Kappa. Her work focuses on the role of ideas of “humans” and “animals” in justifying immoral behavior. She is interested in how economic and systems of oppression generate reasons and justifications for continued violence against groups of individuals and participation in that violence. Lena has worked as an intern in the U.S. Congress, with land examiners at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and as an environmental justice (EJ) intern at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment. She is lab manager of Irene Pepperberg’s parrot cognition lab, a fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics, and is working on two policy projects, one that establishes the first industrial animal agriculture “Superfund” bill and another that regulates technologies employed on animals. For a summer, Lena was on an island of monkeys in Humacao, Puerto Rico researching their social and moral structures. Other research has looked at the brains of dogs and the history and militarization of animal research. Most recently, Lena has been working in the field of “animal-computer interactions.” She will study legal philosophy at Oxford.