During more than two decades with PHR, Vincent Iacopino, MD has conducted medical fact-finding investigations and documented a wide range of human rights violations all over the world, including in Afghanistan, Botswana, Burma, Chad, Chechyna, Iraq, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Türkiye, the United States, and Zimbabwe.
Dr. Iacopino is currently an adjunct professor of medicine with the University of Minnesota Medical School. He is also the former medical director of Survivors International of Northern California, a non-profit organization providing medical and psychological assistance to survivors of torture from around the world. He was the principal organizer of an international effort to develop UN guidelines on effective investigation and documentation of torture and ill treatment (the Istanbul Protocol) and has served as a consultant to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Dr. Iacopino has also examined medical records and/or testified in more than a dozen detainee cases at Guantánamo Bay.
Dr. Iacopino is one of the pioneers in conceptualizing the relationship between health and human rights and has authored more than 120 health and human rights publications. He has taught health and human rights courses at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health since 1995 and is a senior research fellow at the Human Rights Center of the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2004, Dr. Iacopino received the Center for Victims of Torture’s Eclipse Award for extraordinary service on behalf of torture survivors. In 2005, he also received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Medicine of the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Iacopino received his MD and a PhD in physiology from Georgetown University Medical School in 1985. He completed his residency in internal medicine in 1989 and served as chief resident in 1990 at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and Clinics. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford University Medical Center from 1991 to 1993.