In this episode of the Plant-Based Canada podcast, we talk to Dr. Akhtar. Dr. Akhtar is a double Board-certified neurologist and preventive medicine  specialist. She is the Co-founder, President, and CEO of the Center for Contemporary Sciences – a non-profit that is catalyzing the replacement of unreliable animal testing with more effective human-specific research techniques.

Dr. Akhtar is a U-S veteran. She previously served as Deputy Director of the U.S. Army Traumatic Brain Injury Program developing the Army’s brain injury prevention and treatment strategies for soldiers. As a Commander in the U-S Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Dr. Akhtar frequently deployed to assist with national public health emergencies.

For a decade, Dr. Akhtar was a Medical Officer at the Food and Drug Administration, most recently in the Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats, implementing studies on vaccine effectiveness and safety and using her Top Secret Security clearance to develop national preparedness strategies for public health threats.  

Dr. Akhtar is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She is the author of the two books, Our Symphony With Animals. On Health, Empathy and Our Shared Destinies and Animals and Public Health, which argues for the need for health institutions to include animals as part of the “public” in public health. More recently, her non-profit -- the Center for Contemporary Sciences – was instrumental in the U-S Congress passing the FDA Modernization Act – a bill which allows the FDA to consider non-animal drug testing methods, instead of requiring animal tests for approval

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Links and References
Our Symphony with Animals: On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies

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