Mikalah Singer ’20, LLM ’21 is an Oregon-barred attorney with a JD, a Certificate in Animal Law, and an L.L.M. in Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law. While at Lewis & Clark, Mikalah served as the Pro Bono Chair of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, was a member of Animal Law Review, and was a student clerk for the International Environmental Law Project. She earned her BA in Cognitive Science and Psychology with honors from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where she worked on research related to ethics and dehumanization.
She currently works as the Public Policy Manager for the Center for Contemporary Sciences (CCS), a 501(c)(3) working at the intersection of animal exploitation and public health, and is the Founder and Executive Director of Fox Protection International, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness and supporting global efforts to protect fox species and their natural environments. Before her current role, MIkalah was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Environmental Health and Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and part of the Toxicology Policy Program. While at Johns Hopkins and CCS, Mikalah works with policymakers and scientists to support in vitro models in research and safety testing through lobbying, education, and research. At Hopkins, her primary focus was on policy changes that the National Institutes of Health can make in its grant-making process to be more inclusive of the use and development of in vitro and in silico models in biomedical research, and now her work looks more broadly at the public health implications of animal exploitation including industrial agriculture, animal experimentation, and wildlife trade.
Mikalah has previously worked on policy and legal issues with organizations that aim to protect humans, animals, and the environment including the Animal Welfare Institute, Born Free Foundation, Mercy For Animals, and the Green Energy Institute. Mikalah is a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, Chair-Elect for the Animal Law Section of the Oregon Bar, and has been published in both law and scientific journals for her work on alternatives to animal experimentation.