Schuppli's concern for animal welfare brought her to the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics as a postdoctoral fellow (04-06) in CIHR's Ethics of Health Research and Policy Training Program. The objective of the Ethics of Health Research and Policy Training Program is to train the next generation of ethicists for careers with public and private sector policy-making bodies, research institutions and organizations, and universities.

 "Public trust and the credibility of Canada's research sector demands high ethical standards and policies governing research," according to Michael McDonald, the Program Director. However, Canada currently faces a critical shortage of trained practitioners in this complex and important area.

"Through the Ethics of Health Research and Policy, UBC and Dalhousie University are able to offer Doctoral and Post-doctoral Fellows an outstanding opportunity to train as Canada's next generation of bioethicists," McDonald says.

"I am concerned with ethical issues surrounding the use of animals in society - in research, agriculture, and as companion animals - and in particular, how we govern their use," Schuppli says. She adds, "I am interested in understanding our relationship with animals, how this is shaped by culture and how these influence animal welfare."

CIHR also provides fellowships to students at the University of Alberta, University of Toronto and Dalhousie University, who are pursuing graduate studies in the area of health law and policy. The CIHR training grant provides support for an innovative interdisciplinary program that facilitates interactions between students and faculty in a number of different disciplines at the three institutions. In addition to providing fellowship funding, the CIHR program supports interdisciplinary seminars at all three institutions, an internship at Health Canada, a health law and policy curriculum network, and an annual colloquium providing students with an opportunity to present and have their work critiqued by a multi-disciplinary and multi-faculty audience, as well as by other students engaged in health law and policy.

"My thesis explores the role of human rights, especially the right to health, in increasing access to AIDS medicines, focusing on law and politics in South Africa regarding HIV and AIDS and treatment," Forman says.

"It explores international human rights law on health, international trade law on pharmaceutical patents, and South African constitutional law on socioeconomic rights, to assess the interaction between these areas of law and the capacity for human rights-based claims to influence domestic and foreign policies on trade and AIDS medicines trade."

Forman qualified as a lawyer in South Africa with a BA and LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Masters in Human Rights Studies from Columbia University. She has practiced in HIV/AIDS law, advocacy and research in South Africa for several years and has worked in Zambia, Switzerland and the U.S.A. on HIV/AIDS and human rights-related projects.  She has also published several articles and book chapters.

"Despite recent increases in access to pharmaceuticals for the treatment of AIDS in many African countries, economic, political and corporate obstacles remain," Forman says. "Human rights standards in international, regional and domestic legal instruments offer potentially powerful tools for challenging these obstacles at the domestic level and in the international policy arenas in which much global health standard setting occurs."

She adds, "The South African experience is highly illustrative of how human rights can act as powerful tools for social justice. It is important to recognize that access to medicine is not just a humanitarian issue but a human right."