On behalf of the entire editorial team, we would like to welcome you to this new (and improved) issue of AMSA’s Global Pulse Journal. We want to give our thanks to you, our readers and contributors, as your support and overwhelming supply of quality submissions is what enabled us to publish GP for the second time this year – a practice we hope to continue and improve upon. What we do is rooted in your opinions and our commitment as AMSA’s independent, international health journal, completely run by medical students. Based on your feedback, our journal has markedly evolved from our previous issue. With our website redesign, we now feature a more advanced and modern layout, higher quality PDF versions of each article, and a smoother-operating blog, focusing on rich user experience and participation, the use of tags, the integration of online media, and information exchange with other global health blogs. Harnessing the full power of the web, we will continue to integrate our content with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, while working on ways for you to directly contribute content to our blog.

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Leonard S. Rubenstein, JD, is Visiting Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center for Human Rights and Public Health. He spent the 2008-09 academic year as a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and for twelve years prior to that served as Executive Director and then President of Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that mobilizes the health professions to advance human rights.

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Ellen‘t Hoen is the Senior Adviser for Intellectual Property and Medicines Patent Pool at UNITAID. She is a lawyer and an expert in medicines policy and intellectual property law. From 1999 until 2009 she was the Director of Policy and Advocacy at Médecins sans Frontières’ (MSF) Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines. In 2008 she was a research fellow at the IS HIV/AIDS Academy of the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of the book "The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power. Drug patents, access, innovation and the application of the WTO Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health." which was published in January 2009.

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Dr. Anthony So serves as Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, where he started the Program on Global Health and Technology Access in 2004. Trained as a general internist, he completed an accelerated, six-year combined BA-MD program at the University of Michigan, his Master’s in Public Affairs as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Princeton University, his residency training at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and his postdoctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at UCSF/Stanford. He has formerly served as an AMSA Task Force Trustee and a senior member of AMSA Foundation’s Board. He has also worked as a Senior Medical Associate at the American College of Physicians, as a White House Fellow to former HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, as Senior Advisor to the AHCPR Administrator in supporting the Department’s contributions to the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry (and the Consumer Bill of Rights and Responsibilities), and as Associate Director of Health Equity at the Rockefeller Foundation. He now volunteers on the national board of Community Catalyst and the Advisory Board of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.

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